SearchMe, the search engine startup which presents search results as a stack of full-page previews that you can flip through, is bringing its ad network out of beta. The SearchMe ad platform, which was originally named AdView when it launched in February, is the visual search engine’s version of AdWords, except that instead of selling paid text links, it intersperses ads into results of clickable previews of entire webpages, videos, or other visual advertising.
SearchMe’s advertising is appealing because the website becomes the ad itself, making the ad larger and more visually stimulating. So if you search for “Volvo” on SearchMe and if you flip through to the third result, it will be an ad that shows a landing page for Volvo’s latest models. Ad units can also be a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe. As we wrote in our previous review, SearchMe’s approach is similar to what StumbleUpon does, with ads placed in every 20 or so Stumbles.
During the beta period, SearchMe let 600 advertisers experiment with the network, with 50 of the participants being big-name brands, including Campbell’s and Volvo. SearchMe’s CEO and co-founder Randy Adams says that CPCs are $0.25 for the advertisers. And click through rates are high—at around 8%.
While visually appealing landing pages could be a potentially effective form of advertising, there needs to be enough unique visits for the advertising to be valuable in the long term. In February, SearchMe had about 3 million monthly visitors in the U.S, according to Quantcast. In April, the site had grown to 4 million monthly visitors. But in May, the number of U.S. visitors plummeted to around 750,000 visitors in the U.S.
SearchMe says that this drop in numbers is due to the fact that the search engine was spending $500,000 a month in advertising and driving a lot of traffic to the site. The startup is now spending little to no capital on advertising and is in the process of closing distribution deals to place the search bar in browsers and toolbars.
SearchMe maintains that advertisers responded positively to the network and type of ads, and especially the click through rates. And the startup also says it’s not in competition with search engines like Bing and Google, who have the lions share of search traffic. Instead they are out to compete with other visual search engines like Middlespot, Viewzi and Snap.
Sequoia-backed SearchMe originally launched the private beta of its search engine in 2008 and to date has raised $43.6 million in funding.
Spending $500,000 per month to get traffic???
This is insane. I guess when you raise too much money, it is easy to waste it.
Yeah, their Alexa data is weak as well …
Average page views per user:
- Searchme: 1.5
- Kosmix: 1.7
- Powerset: 2.8
- Hakia: 4.0
- Yauba: 5.4
Average time spent per user:
- Kosmix: 1.7
- Searchme: 1.9
- Powerset: 2.6
- Hakia: 3.1
- Yauba: 5.0
I guess this was not one of Sequioa’s better investments.
Looks pretty ..!
Big thumbs up to Yauba. I like it a lot. Although I believe a lot of people are using it to browse Internet sites anonymously and bypass censors.
http://www.pand...re-privacy.html
“Protesting Iranians use search engine Yauba to ensure privacy
It is widely known that dissidents in China have had their blogs deleted and in at least one case a major search engine (Yahoo) have contributed to the arrest of a Chinese journalist. This, along with the Iranian regime’s poor track record when it comes to human rights, is why many Iranian protesters use the Yauba privacy safe search engine.
Ahmed Hossain, CIO of Yauba, tells Pandia: “Our traffic from Iran has jumped 300% over the past several days, as many of them are using the Yauba Search Engine and the anonymity proxy filter to access blocked sites and get news from foreign sources.”
What this has anything to do with Searchme? Pure Spam!!
agree – too few sites start up without a real distribution plan beyond paying for traffic, which is strange since distribution is everything these days.
Like the visual approach, just, if the connection is not super fast, at some point the images load a bit slow, which takes the fun out of zapping through.
Not only are their search results really weak, but they’re quite out of date. That’s no recipe for success.
Hmm, it is always a good idea to always have an option especially when it comes to searching information.
I think SearchMe is a load of crap. Horrible horrible design.
+1
My Problem with this website is that the results are not delivered quickly enough. I am not talking about load time – i am talking about the actual nature of the search itself.
Most people want 2 things as a priority when they search:
1. focus on the term being search
2. access to a lot of information quickly
Showing 1 “big page” on the screen and having to flip through it does not help the end user find content in any, way shape or form. The reason most search engines have gone with a 2 tiered layout (search box, 10-20 results) is because it maximizes the available information to the end user.
In my mind – I got frustrated searching on this platform. I looked at the “pretty pictures” load – but it didnt help me find information.
People search by scanning lots of information at once….why Google is the bomb with minimalistic design. This wins.
Flipping pages in a book as the metaphor? This is the Internet idiots. People want info and want to select it at once in a single glance or two.
The time investment to search via SearchMe is insane.
Plus a bunch of Timmies with loads of VC dollars thinking their poop smells like flowers…well…you get the picture.
$500K / month and your traffic then goes flat when you pop the balloon? THAT MEANS YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS.
There is a reason a company like Google is so successful, simplicity. When Google launched in 98 people flocked to it because they weren’t thrown all the extra crap they didn’t need like they were at Yahoo. I understand they’re not trying to compete with Google as mentioned in the article, but Searchme.com is not something I would ever use more than once. It’s just not appealing or practical.
$43 million for this?? Jeez…someone pass me that koolaid
I was walking past other computers in the office and caught a glimpse of a photo that interested me, (people climbing out on the wing of the aircraft that went down in the Hudson river) but was in a hurry to finish a task. Then I decided to go have a look at this photo and related news about the event. I easily found info on Google but not that amazing photo…the event was still unfolding. I went to searchme.com and flipped through about 15 sites / visual layouts and found the photo I was looking for about 100 times faster than clicking links hitting back button and repeating. There is a place in my life for searchme. After that I started creating stacks and find myself flipping through them to scan headlines quickly….I can see this being better for smart phone searches as well…Hitting back button on phone is no good.
But you sell them traffic, so your opinion doesn’t count!
Google examines the visual search arena constantly, they have many good arguments why it is not useful http://tinyurl.com/c72y7h.
I think that the searchme experience is good, I have doubts how useful it is. I didn’t try the iphone app yet, but it looks more functional for the mobile.
Over the web I use the motion search interface of Qwiji, allowing me to flip through the best video, images and web pages in a stunning browsing interface. http://www.qwiji.com/
Search Google, Yahoo, Bing, Wikipedia, Ebay, and 16 other sites from one search bar.
http://www.republics.us
Trying to take on Google….madness I tell you.
Once once once more…
Another startup that tries to move away from keeping things simple to make something that can only impress their techie friends.
Do startup creators lose so much touch with reality that they just can’t see things from the viewpoint of the layman?
Bah, I could have made this crap in a weekend. Cover flow anyone?
I’m not sure if that last comment went through or not. I hope not. I used Konqueror’s “stop” button, but sometimes that doesn’t work. (That’s Linux for ya, am I right? Ha ha!)
Anyway, I’d like to apologize for the things I wrote. I feel I’ve done TechCrunch and SearchMe a disservice by markedly pointing out something that must have been a massive undertaking to be trivial weekend project.
If you want to know the truth, my unwarranted outburst stems from a core insecurity. I too once made a cover flow styled interface for a up and coming search engine using a flex library – 2 months in the idea was shot down by management, 3 weeks after that SearchMe launched the first time, I was crushed. I guess this was my way of rejecting SearchMe before a group of disgruntled over the hill developers like myself. Juvenile, I know.
In fact I have deep respect for what SearchMe has done for innovating UI over the past 2 years. I myself have been inspired by their ability to resolve that matrix transform for parallax by appropriately compressing images in the z-dimension; I can still remember the glee of seeing this problem solved when I opened my browser that fateful day a year and half ago.
As an entrepreneur, TechCrunch has taught me everything from how to launch a product, how to take funding, how to monetize one’s product, and even how to handle public relations. In fact, there’s very little I do each day that isn’t influenced by TechCrunch in some way.
That’s incredible, if you think about it.
What I’m trying to say is, I would be honored to collectively apologize for the vitriol that I and so many of my fellow commentators have brought to TechCrunch comment boards, and I trust that you will disregard my first response.
Sorry — I think you hit the Stop button a bit too late on this one.
The idea of always wanting to flip through search results does seem a bit misguided. On my macbook air (an admittedly small screen, but still) I can’t actually read the page previews. This is a huge shortcoming and makes google-style results results (perhaps supplemented with popup previews) preferable.
If the site’s entire purpose centers on full page previews, they desperately need to focus on making their page previews as large and readable as possible. They are currently loosing a lot of height to their search bar and their scroll bar. A clever redesign could allow for substantially larger page previews. Alternatively, why not make the previews wider and scrollable. Their current “magnify glass” solution is simply not a pleasant way for most people to browse a page. Also, the text they currently overlay on top of the preview also looks like an ad.
Assuming they get to the point where I can read the page (which I already can on a real monitor), why aren’t they focusing specifically on domains where I actually want to browse multiple search results, such as news and blog search. If I type in “Iran”, and can quickly browse the latest articles and blog posts on Iran, many of which I’ll actually want to scan, their interface makes a lot more sense.
I realize that they already have a “news” tab, but their still pushing general search as their primary application. They need to explicitly push what their interface is good for. Also, if their image search could show multiple images per page, it’d be a lot more useful.
I received a call from New York a friend told me of a new Google Killer, SearchMe. I went on it and was disappointed. Although I must say idea is cool. But 43.6 million dollars where the heck did the money go. On a bootstrap I could have built this. You figure at least the company would have sent a bot to pull better search results. There are like no results. The co-founder must have played golf with someone over at Sequoia or he is related.
I love it! As a private business owner, marketing is one of my major concerns. Searchme really stands out amongst all the other boring text/adword driven search engines.
The interface is refreshing and easy to use. I think down the road all typical search engines will eventually evolve into this format, Searchme is just ahead of the curve.
I don’t use an Iphone but users who do tell me Searchme is their favored search engine because the flipping function comes so naturally. Presumably the compete and comscore figures can’t measure iphone traffic? Be interesting to see what those figures are.
What I just saw was actually cool. SearchMe has a Twitter button to Twitter results. I wonder if it is working for them? The popularity pull from there Twitter is not so strong.
I don’t think this search engine is going to make it. If you look at their home page HTML and how long it takes to load, you realize that while it’s gone for jazz, it hasn’t gotten some important basics right:
http://kiamchoo...o-kindergarten/
I do like the visual aspect of it…yes, indeed cover flow, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. Still, I’m habitually drawn to Google, if not brainwashed.
Wow, it is great to see that the TechCrunch community hasn’t lost its ability to go on a feeding frenzy at the smell of start-up blood
You go boys, we can take it!
Randy
The growth in April was due to heavy ad spend in conjunction with a fundraising round. They were trying to fake growth. Money stops, they have no growth. If this was a good idea, wouldn’t google do it?
Cooliris + Google gets me somewhat the best of both world: integration with my usual search habits, and quick visual interface to go through pictures when looking for something specific rapidly.
Really??
SearchMe is the only site paying for traffic?
Really……..huh……wow. Coulda fooled me, kids.
Rather than dive into the deep end of Lake Vitriol, let me just leave you with two things to mull over.
1. Read this, but only if you’re interested in anything approaching thoughtful and insightful analysis: http://www.sili...om/ver2/?p=5839.
2. Nobody has a perfect track record, but these guys are backed by Sequoia.
Sequoia.
So, you might want to consider the question…..ya think there are a lot of people out there who have gotten rich betting against Sequoia?
Thanks, Ernie. In this game, it’s all about survival. Survive long enough and you can win. Regardless of the negative comments here, we have a strong loyal user base (growing 50% every month) who appreciate us. We will do everything we can to make sure that we continue to serve this community and are open to any constructive criticism about how we can do this better.
Randy