SearchMe Beta

I signed up last week to be included in the Beta of SearchMe and received my invite Thursday.

If you haven't heard of SearchMe it is a Flash (probably Flex) based visual search engine. I gave it a test drive and while there is abviously room to improve (there is always room to improve) The basic functionality is pretty good.

Basic Functionality

You are provided a simple text box in which to type your search term.

As you type categories relating to your search term are displayed as both icon and words, you select the category that is most appropriate to your search term and a image snapshot of the search results are displayed.



A slider bar along the bottom allows you to scroll through the search results. Left clicking on the image takes you to the search results. Your search terms is also highlighted.



But wait, thats not all!

You can also see the classic text search results as well simply drag the divider, located under the drag bar, up a bit to display the text results.

A few Observations

Drag Bar

I have to admit I don't like the drag bar idea for moving through my search results. I mean on the surface it looks like a good idea, but since the search results are paged just like every other search engine that little sliding bar is only for the "current results". Meaning it will allow you to page through the loaded data.

Once you drag the bar all the way over to the right to the end of your loaded search results more search results are asynchronously loaded and your bar springs back to somewhere in the middle, once you let go that is. If you don't let go you can see the search results starting to build to the right but you can't access them until you release the bar and once again click it and start dragging. I would expect that the results would keep scolling by as they load if I have the scroll bar pressed against it's right most limit.

Total Results

There isn't anything telling me how many results have been found for my search. It's not overly critical but it would be nice to know.

Auto Hide

The top tool bar takes up a lot of space, it would be great if I could change the settings to allow it to auto-hide thereby allowing the images of the search results to be a bit bigger.

Full-Screen

Like the auto-hide capability for the tool bar it would also be nice to switch to a full-screen mode for the same reason as hiding the scroll bar.

Search Me The movie

Below is a demo movie of search me.