Friday, March 14, 2008

SearchMe Demos Wicked Cool Visual Search Engine

Looks like I was right on the money back in Oct '07 when I announced that I had spotted SearchMe taking screen shots on one of my sites and I knew this was a hot news item but couldn't get the Sphinners to bite on it.

Here we are 6 months later and the story broke a couple of days ago on the Silicon Valley WebGuild:

Searchme is a new search engine that captures images of web pages and allows users to navigate visually through these page snapshots.
Searchme is currently running a private beta but the flash demo on their web site is real fucking cool so I hope their search technology is as good because this is so wicked it could be a real Google killer.



I'll bet Microsoft, Yahoo or Ask tries to buy this technology ASAP before Google can get their hands on it as something this hot could put any of the lesser search engines back on the map.

If you want information about their spider named Charlotte and IP addresses so you can let Searchme into your site and past your firewall, read my previous post with all the pertinent information.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Charlotte spider has been around since mid 2006 and was a right royal pain the butt because it ignored robots.txt and was a hungry little monster - so got itself blocked asap.

I wonder how often they will refresh their screen shots. Because if it keeps away the people who have no interest in what is on a site, that could possibly save some bandwidth. But equally, it might also reduce Adsense click thrus.

I don't think I'll be unbanning it for quite a while yet, till I can see a benefit for our sites.

Anonymous said...

Any opinion on this piece of software?:

http://www.crawltrack.fr/

TJ said...

I've been beta testing searchme for a while now and unfortunately after a few hours the novelty started to where of.
I much prefer the flash version of searchmash
http://www.searchmash.com/flash/search/

IncrediBILL said...

SearchMash is kinda lame, not even in the same league.

Anonymous said...

My site has been getting hit hard by what appears to be searchme for the past couple of days.
I believe they are related to kavam.net and limelight Networks Inc

These are the ip numbers they appear to be using,
208.111.154.92
209.249.86.17
165.193.254.11

Mine is a UK targeted site, I thought seartchme were only concentrating on US traffic, could this be a sign they are going global?

Anonymous said...

Just found this...

http://www.searchme.com/searchme_ip_details.pdf

which contains this...

"This memorandum contains confidential information and is not to be supplied to any person without
Lighthouse's prior consent.


Total investment in SearchMe, Inc.:
$45 Million
of equity capital proceeds
from institutional venture capital funds
and other private investors from 2004-2008"