A few weeks ago I wrote a post about some mysterious traffic coming from Searchme, the people behind the Wikiseek engine. Turns out they’re busy crawling the web ready to launch their new Searchme engine, currently in limited release Beta.
Here’s some screenshots using basic queries like “Flights” and “Windows Vista SP1” (sigh) to showcase what to expect:
1) Once you’re all signed up for the beta, you get a really simple looking interface. It’s looking quite cool so far!
2) The moment you begin typing a keyphrase, result categories appear in the form of icons.
3) The results page is rather different to the usual textual results you’d expect. (It’s more like a vista style 3D windows thing. What’s that called again?!) You can scroll from left to right using the sliding bar at the bottom of the screen or by clicking a screen shot on the right or left. If you click the screen in the middle, you’re taken through to that website.
At this point I’d like to say that no wonder Searchme crawl is appearing in our analytics data – it looks to me like the crawl is executing on page code like javascript to get a complete view of the website as a user would see it.
What really stands out is that at any one time there are only 3 search results on an entire page. Could this kind of search engine interface encourage more traffic to the top 3 results and much less traffic to the lower queries (and page 2 results)? Usually everyone gets something from text based search engine results but perhaps not with this results layout.
Finally, you’d think feedback on the results quality has to come in to this post at some point. I have tried to focus on showing YOUmoz what the engine looks like rather than expressing much feedback on the search results themselves. It’s early days for Searchme and I’ve submitted feedback on this directly to those friendly folks in thanks for a sneaky peek. I will say one thing though…
4) I couldn’t help but notice how domain name results were dominating the search results.
The results above are from an unofficial website with lots of links to Knowledgebase articles on Vista SP1. The URL is outranking Microsoft and the official Windows Vista blog. Doh!
It will be really interesting to see how the industry takes to this UI and its search results quality, especially after the adverse reaction to Searchme’s first engine, Wikiseek.
Richard Baxter is Founder and Director of SEOgadget.co.uk, a UK SEO Consulting firm. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz…
