searchme beta

My better half turned me on tonight on a new search engine in beta.

searchme.com is an interesting twist on an old thing. When you log in you get the main screen. Lots of black and kind of retro looking. Enter a search term and it dynamically fetches the results and shows you where your hits are in a category fashion. For example here's my results:

Pretty good as it shows Software, Web Development, Computer Programming, Architecture, and Blogs. All relevant.

When you go further into results you get a Web 2.0 look and feel that resembles something like the Windows Vista task switcher, but done for the web. It's Flash rather than (what I thought was Silverlight) but it's still pretty cool.

You can page through the results like flipping through your iTouch and see previews of the pages in your search results. Clicking on a page takes you to it. There's also a text description below that lets you navigate that way and the title of these items scroll and attach themselves to the search result page as you flip through them (you can also maximize the search results and only see the graphical navigator if you prefer). If you click on one of the categories the engine puts the search results into (how it decides what goes where is black magic) the results will filter down to only that category. Also if you prefer night over day, you can change this in the minimal settings dialog in the top right corner:

The big advantage to this is you can not only see the result page (and decide visually if you want to go there) but also if you hover over the bottom of the preview it pops up the text of the page and highlights your search term. Again, this will help you decide if it's worth going to the page or not without loading it up. Form and functionality, now that's a first!

I seriously feel like my web browser turned into an iPod or iTouch and the it makes vanity searching that much more fun now. Me likes Web 2.0 (some days).

If you're interested checkout searchme.com but you'll have to hurry. When I signed up there were only a few hundred beta slots left and by the time I finished this blog entry (about 15 minutes with screen caps) 50 of them were gone!