The current search engines used by Google, Yahoo, MSN etc are text-based search engine. They rely on searchers visually checking every link to check to see if the result is what they are really looking for.
SearchMe.com has recently launched a beta version of its exciting new visual search. Simply download a plugin for Internet explorer to search web pages, images and videos. Using this search option, enter your keywords as normal and then select the sub search from: business books, search engines, business news, advertising and marketing, software and all.
Now this is where the big difference comes in – the results, rather than being listed in text format are in visual representations of the media, presented in a Windows Vista style format. This lets you instantly check the quality of the site without wasting time clicking through text links.
In addition, it highlights the search terms on the pages of the visualisations to give you an indication of the relevancy of the page to your search query.
This is really cool stuff, so check it out yourself – there is a lot more to this visual search than I have told you here.
Have just checked things out a little bit further – I entered in three popular keyword phrases which I have consistently held #1 Spot on Google for over a year and not one of these sites came up in the first 20-30 visualisations shown. Most of the result sites looked like vendor sites, rather than informational sites – so looks very much like the search results are filtered. Maybe there is a bit of lead generation going on!