SearchMe, a new Sequoia-backed search engine that launched in March, isn’t happy with some of the screen shots that have been seen around the Internet promoting Yahoo’s new BOSS (“Build Your Own Search Service”) product.
In particular, this shot, which was included in a CNET article, shows what appears to be SearchMe’s search interface (itself borrowed from Apple’s iTunes album browser) with the logo cut off (compare it to this). CNET describes the screen shot as “One idea Yahoo showed for BOSS: show miniature versions of the Web pages returned by search results.”
To be fair to Yahoo, the screen shot was included in a press briefing document (the slide, which I also received, is shown below) and Yahoo was using it only as an example to show how the service worked. Yahoo has also said that they reached out to SearchMe to discuss a partnership, as they’ve done with scores of other companies. In the briefing, Yahoo didn’t specifically call attention to the slide, and it was made clear to journalists (or at least me) that the product wasn’t made for front end design, just as a search web service.
Yahoo probably should have left the SearchMe logo on the screen shot, but given how many other things there are to criticize Yahoo for these days, I’m inclined to give it a pass.
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I don’t like the visual search. I tried it and within a minute I found it to be slow and not very useful. When searching for websites all you need is a small description and thumbnail of website. Maybe 300px X 300px… Loads a lot faster and gets the job done. The visual search is cool on an ipod, but not for searching
Just found an article with a cool video/demo of SearchMe that you should check out if you don’t know the product. Seems like they were at TC50.
There is no confllict of interest here other than showing everyone that building a similar business to SearchMe with Yahoo BOSS is very possible, which it is. Sequoia should be pleased…..
the searchme-yahoo copy cat could not be a good thing for searchme. i tried searchme and many times it will not pick up a domain or link that i type directly in the search bar. back to the drawing boards fellas.
VerticalLocator.com
It’ll work if you typein domains that don’t belong to you.
Since the UI seems to be inspired by Apple, one of them should partner with Apple to win the perspective of authority on this Visual Search UI.
Or Apple should launch iSearch ( or iSomething) with this same design, and just clear the table.
Try this instead.
This shows how easy it is build a site like “searchme” with Yahoo! BOSS. It took about 4-6 hours and fortunately, the results are much more relevant. The images are not crispy since I am using a free version of thumshots.org.
Site below -
http://yahoovisualsearch.appspot.com/
Are you one of the Yahoo employee?
Just a while ago some other moron @ yahoo tried to copy CUILL and got busted..
dude.. we understand Yahoo BOSS is neat and fast.. but that doesn’t mean you guys go around belittling the bold new ideas out there with your crap.
And make no mistake.. end of the day its not the speed of technical implementation but its the overall idea and consumer adoption..
I thought Apple patented the coverflow UI
I fail to see how coverflow can make web search easier. Image search for sure, video search maybe, but information retrieval?
Why don’t anyone just try to build a search engine according to people’s wishes and search habits instead of building non-user friendly ones?
It’s a dead on copy. Tisktisk Yahoo!
We also launched today, as part of the Mashable Yahoo BOSS Challenge, a new search engine powered by Yahoo BOSS that includes the capabilities of website thumbnails on search results. We’ve been developing for the last 2 years a highly scalable developer focused website thumbnails provider platform and we use that to showcase it at http://www.uquery.com.
Yahoo BOSS is really powerful and fast, allowing us to focus on creating other new cool features leveraging results provided by BOSS instead of creating our own crawler and maintaining a complex infrastructure.
Give us feedback on http://www.uquery.com
Thanks,
Marcio Castilho
When will people learn that it is never a good idea to use third-party web services since you risk the plug being pulled out from you one day?
Yahoo! is working greatly these days. With its Y!OS strategy, it is greatly contributing to open source web development. Don’t bother Yahoo! about these controversies and keep the track. We are waiting for something great!
How much better does ‘web search’ need to get? The technology has basically become a commodity. Yahoo! won’t win search by building a better index, at this point it’s a brand war for consumers and an marketplace war for advertising dollars. This prompts the move from search as destination to applications built on top of search technologies.
Dipity built a mashup with DayLife + Yahoo! BOSS + Dipity and found the results to be great from both services and that it was a great way to connect up to a powerful index. If Google were open we would have simply included those as well and had broader content reach.
http://www.dipity.com/mashups/newsline
(for light weight SearchMe style view minus stacks, click ‘flipbook’)
Has anyone else noticed the middle sample is the design for http://www.seeqpod.com? They should have a problem with this too…