Imagine a search engine that shows images instead of just giving you a few lines of text.
That's the idea behind searchme.com. According to the site, its creators, fed up with search results crammed with irrelevant junk, designed a visual website so they could see the site before they visited it. They customised the search engine for visual results, but also designed it to avoid unwanted material, such as adult content.
The images that are shown are too small to read easily - obviously, loading the full website would defeat the purpose - but the search engine does highlight your search terms on the page so you can get a general idea if the website is what you're looking for. Users can scroll quickly through the results, too, as well as specify whether they want to search for a website, videos or images. Once a search term has been entered, the site also suggests various categories to help narrow down your search. The result is similar to the iTunes album viewer.
The site doesn't force users to completely rely on pictures either. Users can get text information about a website by either moving their cursor over an image or by opening a box below the main results.
I found the image search function relatively useless, since almost all of the results came from flickr.com, a site that is blocked by etisalat. Most of the video search results were all from YouTube, but in this case, searchme.com does a good job displaying the results in an easy to watch manner.
The real test though was searching the web, but the results here were mixed. When searching for general information on places or popular figures, the site did well.
However, when I tried to use the site to find specific people or information, the search results were often off the marks.
The site does let viewers save their results in "stacks". However, the site at this time only saves the information to the flash viewer. That means if the results can easily be lot and won't be available from other computers. The site claims to be fixing that soon, however.
The site does provide a good way to browse for sites, but if you're looking for something usual, stick with Google.
