Anyone want to buy $45 million worth of visual search patents and other intellectual property? That’s about how much venture capital went into visual search engine SearchMe, which closed down in July and was looking for a buyer. It looks like that search was not successful, and now it is offering to sell its portfolio of intellectual property, in whole or in part, to the highest bidder.
In an offering document which is now available on the site (and embedded below), SearchMe’s senior secured lender, Lighthouse Capital Partners, is looking to get whatever it can from the sale of the search startup’s IP. From the document:
An Update to our post yesterday about Sequoia-funded search startup SearchMe. The company needs a new round of financing or a quick acquisition to stay online, but so far neither are happening. CEO Randy Adams wrote to me this morning with an update on where things stand. I reprint most of it below with his permission. Bottom line, The site may go offline at least temporarily tomorrow if a buyer does not step in (Update: The site now redirects to Google):
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.
What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.
The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck.
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.
A company profile that was just submitted: Middlespot, another startup taking a crack at making the web search experience more visual, joining the likes of SearchMe, Snap and Viewzi.
Like its counterparts, Middlespot aims to enhance searching for websites, images, news, Amazon and even Twitter by returning screenshots of results rather than just text links.
Kicking off a keyword-based search opens two columns: to the left, you’ll get standard stuff like title, summary and full link, and on the right you’ll get a visual representation of search results. In the latter column, you can make the frames bigger or smaller by using the slider or scrolling your mouse wheel, and hovering over the boxes will highlight them and offer a couple of options. It’s all pretty straightforward, so check it out.
What happens when you make paid search ads both relevant and visual? Searchme, the search engine startup which presents results as a stack of full-page previews that you can flip through, is hoping to find out with the beta launch of AdView. Its first foray into advertising, AdView is SearchMe’s version of AdWords, except that instead of selling of paid text links it will be interspersing into its results clickable previews of entire Webpages, videos, or other visual advertising.
If you are an advertiser and want to try it out, SearchMe is giving a free trial to the first 500 companies or individuals that sign up here. That’s right, you get to run a free ad campaign on SearchMe for 30 days.
To see how this works, search for “Ralph Lauren” and if you flip through to the third result, it will be an ad that shows a landing page for its fall collection. In other words, the Website becomes the ad itself. This approach is similar to what StumbleUpon does, with ads placed in every 20 or so Stumbles. But the ad unit can also be a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe. For instance, check out the third result when you search for “Mac” (SearchMe inserted one of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads for demonstration purposes).
Okay, this has to be the coolest hack of the week. Visual search engine SearchMe has just added a music search tab that brings back results with free, legal, unlimited full-song streams and cover art you can flip through. It’s CoverFlow on the Web. And it actually trumps the experience one Yahoo’s music search, which also offers free full streams through Rhapsody—but those are limited to 25 streams a month per searcher.
SearchMe instead is tapping into imeem’s vast catalog of fully licensed music. (Along with Rhapsody and MySpace Music, imeem is one of a handful of companies with comprehensive music streaming rights from all the major labels). [Correction] But SearchMe is not using imeem’s API, which originally was limited to apps on imeem itself, but has since been extended to other sites through a. Instead, it using thewidget loophole in imeem’s licensing deal with the record labels. Imeem users can stream any song and create playlists on imeem itself or through imeem’s widgets which can be embedded elsewhere. (Other partners such as Apture and Slide also use imeem’s API to invoke imeem widgets).
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.
As Lehman Brothers sells off its assets following its bankruptcy, there is still a big question as to what will happen to its venture arm and, more importantly, how any change in ownership will affect the companies in which Lehman Brothers Venture Partners holds a stake. Like many investment banks, Lehman got into venture investing in the mid-1990s to try to capture some of those venture returns. The investment management group that it was a part of was sold off to Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman on Monday, but the venture arm was not part of that sale. Instead, Lehman Brothers Venture Partners is trying to spin itself off as a separate venture firm with about $800 million in assets.
But if it cannot do that, it will either go to hungry creditors or a financial buyer who may be more interested in liquidating the fund than in nurturing the startups in its portfolio. Those startups include Kayak, SearchMe, Jaxtr, Endeca, and about 80 more (A partial list from CrunchBase is below. Other than comScore, most are still private).. They could wake up tomorrow and find that they have a new shareholder who is even more impatient for a quick exit than its existing ones. It’s like being an orphan and wondering who your next foster parents will be.
Searchme is starting to focus much of its time in the mobile space. Last week, it said it will launch an iPhone app and today it announced that it has launched a visual search engine for mobile devices that can be accessed by surfing to the company’s mobile page.
Searchme’s visual search engine delivers results as a browsable list of “pages,” which are actually images of websites that can be viewed before visiting them. To help users during the search process, Searchme’s search engine suggests categories that have some relevance to the query you’re inputting into the service if you want to drill-down into related topics, and provides shortcuts to the best results to try to cut down on search time.
We once asked if Apple’s CoverFlow is a better interface for image search than the typical thumbnail grid approach. But what about for mobile search? SearchMe thinks it is good for both.
The visual search engine that launched last March is working on a natural extension: a visual search app for the iPhone. The app is ready, but the company is still waiting for it to be approved by Apple for the iTunes App Store. Co-Founder John Holland showed me a functioning version of the app earlier this week at TechCrunch50.
I like SearchMe better on the iPhone than I do on my laptop. The idea of flipping through images to find something is already ingrained into some of the most basic features of the iPhone—whether it is flipping through photos or the app menu itself. Maybe I’ve been too well-trained by Google, but when I am searching on my computer, I find it hard to beat the efficiency of skimming down a list of text links. When I do a search on my iPhone, though, I am always squinting and resizing the browser.
New Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe launched a bunch of new features today – new video and image search engines as well as a new visual bookmarking tool called stacks.
The main new feature, stacks, allows users to bookmark and group sites and share them, visually, with others. To create a stack, you simply drag results into a newly created stack. See the how to video below, and here is a sample stack of companies that launched at the TechCrunch40 Conference last year. You can see more public stacks here.
I’ll be the first to admit that the first (private) release of SearchMe was a little rough around the edges. The results look great, and it’s fun to scroll through them like albums in iTunes, but the relevance and ranking wasn’t so hot.
Relevance and ranking is getting better, though. It’s the focus on the company now, says CEO Randy Adams. And the effort is being led by new VP of Research Mike Mathieson, who joined the company three weeks ago from Yahoo, where he was the director of engineering for web relevance.
SearchMe is one of only a handful of companies that indexes the entire web, so they’re serious about evolving into a big search player over the years. Search volume is up to 100,000 – 200,000 queries per day, says Adams. so they must be doing something right. Some users just want the quick text search results that they’re used to, and SearchMe’s visual results just slow down the process. But others (like my parents) like seeing the page before clicking on it.
New Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe is just starting to send invitations to their private beta, which launched last week. The company says there are 30,000 people now on the waiting list. But if you want to get in now, just click here and enter your email. The first 1,000 people get in immediately.
Mountain View based SearchMe has been around since 2005 and has raised $31 million from Sequoia, DAG Ventures and Lehman Brothers. But until last weekend when I met founders Randy Adams and John Holland I knew next to nothing about them. It now joins Mahalo as one of Sequoia’s big bets in search.
I say “next to nothing” because I actually did write about them before. In January 2007 the company launched a test product called WikiSeek that returned results only from Wikipedia and sites linked from Wikipedia. At the time Adams said WikiSeek was just a test product for the technology they developed. Now, over a year later, their ready to put up their main site.
SearchMe goes into private beta today – sign up on the home page for an account. The main difference between SearchMe and other search engines is that it returns results primarily in a visual format, via an image of the result site. The results are displayed in a way that is similar to browsing through albums in iTunes – see the following videos to get an idea of how it looks:
Today SearchMe has indexed just a tiny portion of the web – about 1 billion pages. But they are quickly adding to the index, and say that what they’ve grabbed so far is suitable to show off their technology. In the live demo I saw some results that were great. Other searches returned only so-so results.
Categorization and Vertical Search
SearchMe isn’t all flashy graphics. They are also auto-categorizing every page in the index to help users with disambiguation. A search for “Apple” can be done in the category “technology” to avoid results about fruit. And when you search, SearchMe places the categories it thinks are important at the top. In the screenshot above, the query “safari” shows categories including “companies,” “software,” wildlife,” “photography,” etc. The image to the right shows category suggestions for “blackberry.”
Update: Louis Gray noted SearchMe was indexing his site back in February, and said “Is it taking a graphical snapshot, in the same way that www.archive.org has done to show how Web sites looked over time? I’m not exactly sure.”
Palo Alto based startup SearchMe has kept a low profile since being founded in March 2005. The company, which has 17 employees and raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital over two rounds, will launch a number of what founder Randy Adams calls “long tail search engines” in the near future. The first product they are launching is WikiSeek, which went live about an hour ago and will be officially announced on Wednesday.
WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.
The search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view). The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.
In addition to the search engine, WikiSeek has two additional tools – a search plugin for FireFox, IE7 and Opera, and a really useful greasemonkey-like Firefox extension that will change the way Wikipedia looks on that browser by adding a “WikiSearch” button to the search box (see screen shot below). Click that button and see WikiSeek’s Wikipedia-only results. It’s faster and better than the results Wikipedia returns through its native search feature.
SearchMe is donating “the majority” of revenue generated from advertising on WikiSeek to the Wikimedia Foundation. Adams told me earlier this evening that WikiSearch is a showcase product for their technology, and they are happy to help the Wikipedia community as much as possible by donating those revenues.
Confusion with Wikiasari
WikiSeek will undoubtedly be confused with the much discussed Wikiasari search engine that was announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales last month. In fact, in our original post on Wikiasari, we included a screenshot that we later learned was not a prototype of Wikiasari. We corrected that post, and asked “the Wikisearch Screenshot Isn’t Wikiasari, So What Is It?” It was actually an early WikiSeek prototype, then called WikiSearch. Question answered.
