We’ve known that that visual search engine SearchMe has been looking for a new round of financing these last few months. But from what we hear they aren’t having a lot of luck closing that financing – something was on the table, our sources say, but fell through. As an alternative strategy, they’ve approached a number of possible buyers to see if they can close an acquisition of the company or its technology, multiple sources have confirmed. If a buyer can’t be found quickly, the site may shut down.
The search engine first launched in March 2008, and has raised around $44 million in venture capital. Sequoia Capital has backed them from the start, beginning with a $400,000 seed round in 2005.
SearchMe has an innovative visual approach to search that lets users scroll through screen snapshots quickly. It is particularly appealing on the iPhone, and has been one of my favorite apps since launching late last year. It’s something that is just perfect for a mobile device with a large touchscreen.
Here’s SearchMe on the iPhone:
Sadly traffic to SearchMe’s main site never really took off. It grew fairly respectably to 1.8 million monthly unique visitors in March (comscore worldwide), but much of that traffic was generated from paid traffic (which was freely admitted by the company). When the marketing ended, traffic dipped to about 600,000 unique visitors in May. For more traffic data see Quantcast, which is directly measuring their traffic.
It’s because they have too much tech. Dump the tech, get monkeys like ChaCha did, and boom…$4 million.
Learn to fundraise people.
The URL (www.searchme.com) redirects to http://www.google.com. It’s this happening to other people? Were they purchased already or are they down?
compete says their traffic practically evaporated in the last three month. any idea why? a meteor?
Bing.
More than bing, basically not many people know about searchme!
Because once they stopped spending their $$$ on advertising no one really cared about this product.
44 Million for this? Yeah, OKAY.
searchme.com is so pitiable, why needs $43M for this?
Well its not a waste product but its not marketed properly.
All their money went to marketing and this is not a ‘product’ nor is it a waste. I prefer the term ‘joke’.
43M? what the f were they thinking. for comparison, twitter has raised $55M
$44 million, fuck me that’s a lot of money. How did they manage to spend all that?
Yeap, 44 mill were wasted on this product from my point of view. No one will buy it.
On the net simple is beautiful.
By the way, they may have spent a lot of money/time for crawling the net. Judging them by the UI only may not be fair. They can sell the index/crawl data/ technology to Bing when they are trying to be more visual.
I bet my CTO could have hacked it with $ 44 dollars worth of coffee and doughnuts.
Cool app, but $ 44mil is a joke.
Then I d suggest you pay your CTO $10,000 worth of Coffee and doughnuts and get him to create for you either a better version of google or a better version of windows 7
What is their business model? It doesn’t look like something that can be monetized using an Adwords or display advertising model.
How did they spend the $40 million dollars?
No wonder traffic to their main site dried up, the site is to labour intensive. Takes about 15 seconds to get your search results. Sure, visually it is very pleasing but in the real world we all want things in a hurry..
are you on a dial up? it takes me about .015 seconds to get results
at least searhme looks nice (design)
@wesley “in a hurry” atkins
I am sure that line works with the ladies — every time.
My guess is that the majority of the funding was used for the crawling and indexing technology rather then for the actual UI and App.
I personally like the idea of it, but find it frustrating to use, I would much rather consume my data as a list.
nah that doesnt cost 44M. they spent all the money on advertising. that’s all they could think of
This site has been a failure from the beginning. I came across it like 10 times in its history. It just wasn’t appealing at all. No surprise if it shuts down without a buyer. Such as shame.
Seriously, we have to figure this out. According to CrunchBase SearchMe has 52 employees, which is insane. One product manager, one designer, one AS3 programmer and a few backend developers would have been enough. Come on, I bet they’re even using Solr or something similar to index their scrapings.
And don’t get me started on the terrible idea of building a visual search engine. When I’m doing my googling I don’t care how the pages look like, I just wan’t relevant information. And to be honest, in most cases the worst looking pages is the ones with relevant information.
Seriously, if a business cannot make it after an initial capital investment of $44 mill – then it can be only one of 2 things… The business model does not work (variety of reasons), or the leadership/management is flawed. Well, that’s my thoughts anyway.
When every search query costs the service provider 2MB in bandwidth, and 2 seconds to load, you have to be very naive to believe that you can generate a CPM that exceeds your costs, and yet persuade any user to leave Google for the benefit of a CoverFlow like search engine.
In fact, even if they had Google brand itself attached to the service, and was a native browser feature, it still would’ve fail.
You can’t search in CoverFlow view, it’s not feasible and costs the service provider too much money.
Please keep the bells and whistle for photos and videos services (aka Cooliris), and keep the other search fields simple.
A black page. Nice. ;)
Very expensive proof that visual searching is not working (at least this way).
I need information, not low resolution images of how information is presented.
Though I’ve been gone from the company for nearly a year, as one of the founders of Searchme, I think it’s a fair assessment to assign blame to the leadership of the company, and I accept full responsibility. We had committed investors, buckets of cash, great technology, and a fantastic team. While I was at Searchme, we made many mistakes, which I do not care to enumerate in this forum. I can’t speak to decisions and events after I left Searchme; I will simply let the current reality speak for itself. We often said, “it’s ours to f up,” and I still believe that. So, if you want to blame leadership, fair enough.
However, I think it’s unfair to criticize the skills, commitment, and accomplishments of Searchme’s dedicated employees. Their passion, courage, and creativity energized me on a daily basis. Their talents never ceased to surprise, delight, and amaze me. Denigrating their contributions betrays a profound ignorance of the immensely difficult task of building a search engine from scratch, not to mention the many ground-breaking innovations that were fundamental to the product.
I am extremely grateful to this amazing team of people who tirelessly poured their lives into our collective vision. They became my best friends. They deserve full-credit for the many successes we experienced at Searchme, and I wish we could have been more capable leaders so that their brilliance and hard work could be better rewarded.
It’s kind of sad but I guess people are more into the simple text search engines more. The whole searchMe Idea never really appealed to me.
Yes, I agree… 44M is a big waste .. I have tried SearchMe so many times, everytime after I read a post abt it here and there .. It looks good .. but its not very efficient ….. I would like to see more results in one view of the page .. which Google gives me .. why would I click 10 times to see 10 search results …. I think visual search in its current form on SearchMe is not a very efficient way to search results
Here is my comment, which keeps getting removed, for some strange reason:
Though I’ve been gone from the company for nearly a year, as one of the founders of Searchme, I think it’s a fair assessment to assign blame to the leadership of the company, and I accept full responsibility. We had committed investors, buckets of cash, great technology, and a fantastic team. While I was at Searchme, we made many mistakes, which I do not care to enumerate in this forum. I can’t speak to decisions and events after I left Searchme; I will simply let the current reality speak for itself. We often said, “it’s ours to f up,” and I still believe that. So, if you want to blame leadership, fair enough.
However, I think it’s unfair to criticize the skills, commitment, and accomplishments of Searchme’s dedicated employees. Their passion, courage, and creativity energized me on a daily basis. Their talents never ceased to surprise, delight, and amaze me. Denigrating their contributions betrays a profound ignorance of the immensely difficult task of building a search engine from scratch, not to mention the many ground-breaking innovations that were fundamental to the product.
I am extremely grateful to this amazing team of people who tirelessly poured their lives into our collective vision. They became my best friends. They deserve full-credit for the many successes we experienced at Searchme, and I wish we could have been more capable leaders so that their brilliance and hard work could be better rewarded.
I’ll agree with you that the entry cost to the search engine industry is becoming more and more everyday. A good search engine means data collecting bots, which require huge server farms to run, which cost tons of money.
So I can see where the 44m would have been spent.
I think we are at a crossroad where search will be a market dominated by monopolies, with the entry cost too high for new players.
Search strikes me as an extremely capital intensive industry. When you consider that companies like Microsoft spend $100 million on advertising alone, I’m not surprised at what it took to develop and try to market SearchMe. Competing in the web search business looks like it’s become prohibitively expensive for a start-up in this economic climate.
I suppose it’s easy to criticize them (and I’m not suggesting there isn’t merit to some of the criticism), but Searchme appears to have done some really creative work, and they did it in the worst economy in 75 years.
I hope the people there keep that context in mind and have a measure of pride in what they’ve done. They seem to be the pioneers in what will almost surely become a visual medium within a decade.
Never heard of ‘em — and that’s a problem. In a crowded marketplace, if you launch a company and nobody hears of you, does it make a sound? It’s particularly bad if you’re a new search engine. How do you expect people to find you — through SEO? Yeah, ’cause everyone’s running over to Google to search for “new search engines.” Sad and pathetic. Budget for marketing, people — big fat budgets. Technology alone rarely wins the race. Without good marketing, you’ll be Betamaxed out of existence.
maybe because they don’t have a clue of what they’re doing in terms of marketing.
did they really had the iphone floating in the hands; at the end of the video? wtf?! people should hire creative people with good taste and a sharp sense of production to get things done right.
by the way; their website isn’t working.
omg! is just that i keep looking at that video and can’t possibly understand how someone with $44M in funding can end up with a presentation for their product like this one! i’m vomiting all over my place!
maybe the salary of their chairman was $43M.
The real problem is that Google has bought its way into every channel. They paid Mozilla to be the default search. They paid Dell to be the default search on every new Dell since 2008. They bought their way onto the Palm Pre and of course Android phones. Google’s CEO Schmidt is on the Board of Apple (see SEC investigation for details) and assures a tight tie up with Apple products and Google default engine.
So all these newer companies have better technology, but cannot match the monopolistic and Goliath purse strings Google waves. THese companies are not competing against technology, but users’ laziness and lack of ability to have any reason to investigate how they can be better off elsewhere (see: Financial Industry as example).
Google is a danger to your privacy, to your pocketbook and will WalMart’ize the Internet.
I personally believe that a major cause of Google’s search dominance has been these tie ups, especially the ones with Dell and Mozilla.
Firefox is used by over 600 million people, and they had Google as the default search engine. A lot of these people also downloaded the version with Google bar already installed.
If MSFT was any smarter, they would pay Mozilla to make Bing the default search engine.
Check ShinySearch.com – this is not a visual search engine like searchme.com but rather make your search homepage and results page visualy enhanced!
Appears official. SearchMe shut down. All-hands employee meeting at 10am today (Friday) and now searchme.com redirects to Google.
Very sorry to hear as I have friends who work/worked there. Good luck everyone.
Wats this ! http://www.searchme.com redirects to http://www.google.com !
Yeah, I just noticed that too. Searchme.com redirects to Google. Safe to say Google acquired Searchme?
Searchme was a failed plan to begin with.
The site is already down, sadly. I just started using the site a month ago after reading an article in Wired magazine by Ryan Singel, June 30, 2009 “Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google”. It’s hope some realizes it’s a value and purchase it. Maybe even Google! Call it Google Gold! Here’s hoping.
**CORRECTED** The site is already down, sadly. I just started using the site a month ago after reading an article in Wired magazine by Ryan Singel, June 30, 2009 “Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google”. Let’s hope someone realizes it’s a value and purchase it. Maybe even Google! Call it Google Gold! Here’s hoping.
People on the internet search “visually”
That doesn’t mean that they literally search “visually” – they just scan through text and images in a “visual” manner.
SearchMe (and a lot of other startups) took that “search visually” literally and made nonsense products on top of that premise.
Come on people. You don’t need a giant pic of a webpage to know if it will be worth your time.
I am extremely sad that this amazing search engine has been shut down. It has been helping many people I see that have specific learning disabilities. i really hope someone will take the initiative to take over the company. Google would do well to use the system for disadvantaged people.
Sandy you recommended this site to us earlier this year in relation to our special needs kids – once the word spread many of our students were using it – it was fantastic.
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SpaceTime3D is the originator of Visual Search on the internet. It’s available at http://www.spacetime.com
With SpaceTime3D you can search Google, Wikipedia and Flickr in a stunning interface. I hope you give it a try.
Yet another Visual search engine to shutdown is Riya.
But Riya morphed into a successful alternate ecommerce business model as Like.com (http://www.like.com).
Riya management changed their business plan one year back into Like.com.
See http://digital....arch-site-riya/ for details.
–Mahesh
08/25/09:
Looks like searchme.com is now forwarded to google.com
No news about google’s acquisition of searchme or of the searchme.com domain
http://news.goo...=%22searchme%22
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