Randy

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?

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.”

Randy

http://kiamchoo...o-kindergarten/

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.

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.

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.