But SearchMe and PicLens are useful for specific cases where the user is evaluating the look-and-feel and not the textual specifics of pages or images - such as image & video searches. For example, the graphic designers in our studio find these applications useful for browsing images for inspiration.

They are also useful for the growing home theater PC mode of lean-back couch surfing, which tends to be more social. I have both an HP Windows Vista-based HTPC as well as a Mac Mini that I use as my home music system, HDTV receiver, PVR, home movie and slideshow projector and occasionally to show-and-tell friends and family about viral or interesting websites and videos.

Google and the current set of dominant lean-forward web applications are not particularly pleasant to use in this environment. SearchMe and PicLense are much better suited for browsing and group-evaluating pages from a distance. As social couch surfing becomes more prevalent, these new models will take off.

If I were a VC, I’d be all over this. SearchMe is likely to have a huge future (either as a solid standalone or as a buyout opportunity).

Tafiti had labeled stacks, a carousel, and drag+drop results to shelf, and simple sharing at launch, and later added live messenger integration.

I’d argue the value is probably higher for non-web page results - images, video, etc., where it would play to strengths of coverflow.

btw- source for Tafiti can be used under the MS-PL, so you could in theory use the IP to build your own SearchMe (http://www.codeplex.com/wlquickapps)

Yahoo & Google image/video search are not yet content-search capability. They still rely on text-annotation/meta-tags/keywords that describe the item. Content search , is you can query a sample image/video-segment and the system retrieves from the database images/videos that are similar to the target query. I believe that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are developing content search. The techniques used are largely from the domain of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Digital Signal Processing & Image Processing.

The technology is still in its infancy, but there have been numerous commercial applications already developed for automated clinical decision support system (CDSS) and deployed in hospitals & clinics. Eg, when a patient is admitted to hospital (perhaps an emergency case and very critical) and an MRI scan is required to be taken immediately, sometimes the physician on duty is not an expertise in interpreting medical images, since the expert specialist only works during the day (not available at night shift). The hospital either call the specialist at 3 am at his home in the morning to wake him up & request to come to the hospital, since the physician on duty doesn’t fully understand of what’s being revealed in the patient’s MRI. Hospitals that do have image retrieval CDSS , usually run the new MRI scan against their CDSS database to retrieve, say the 10 most similar images to the patient’s MRI. The physician on duty, then browse each of the 10 records (ie, stored medical records with MRI images of previous patients) and try to see what sort of treatments that these similar cases (ie, similar MRI) had been prescribed by those experts/specialists who diagnosed those patients. This narrows down the choices of the inexperience physician on duty, if the situation is quite critical for the patient which might lead to death if there is a longer delay when the physician him/herself spends an hour or more in the hospital’s medical library searching thru the books/periodicals/journals, etc… of a treatment/diagnosis for similar cases (similar MRI) that had been documented in the past. An automated image content retrieval CDSS is faster, than digging out info in the library.

This is already happening today in hospitals & clinics and the technology is going to get better & better over time.

All in all, very unimpressive. These guys won’t capture 1% of search. Not even 0.1%. But that’s not even the point. All these guys fail at the basic search engine marketing math. Guys who get 1% of Google’s traffic, for example, think that they can earn 1% of Google’s revenues. NOT SO! Google relies on its scale to extract better revenues. Someone who has 1% of Google volume can’t expect to earn 1% of of their revenue. It just won’t happen.

Search has become a brand business today. People can’t tell quality differences between Yahoo and Google anymore so it all comes down to branding.

So, after $44M (WOW!) SearchMe will find itself in a deadpool at some point.

I just submitted a comment that went straight to your spamfolder, ie, Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Cheers.

A question. Do you do multimedia content search & retrieval or perhaps you’re intending to do so at some stage if it is something that you don’t do at this stage? If your answer is yes, then I can point you out to resources that may be very useful to your product development.