SearchMe

» see searchme.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

2008 was the year the tech press ran the phrase google killer about once a month. Cuil got the loudest version of it that july and I remember the name from the coverage, not from using it. SearchMe got a quieter version three months earlier, and by then I was out of university and working, with a search habit that had been muscle memory since the ttnet years. That is the hardest thing in the world to sell against.

Randy Adams and John Holland started the company in March 2005 in Mountain View. Adams has said the idea came from watching his five-year-old son struggle with reading, which is a more interesting origin than most search startups have, because it points at the actual bet: that a page you recognize by sight is easier to pick out of a list than a page you have to read a description of.

Sequoia Capital funded the early years and by March 2008 the company had taken thirty one million dollars in. The site went into beta that same month with a billion pages indexed, opened to everyone in April, and the tagline printed on all of it was you'll know it when you see it.

What you got was Cover Flow pointed at the web. Type a query and the results came back as full screenshots of the pages themselves, stacked and angled, and you dragged left or right to flip through them. The search terms were highlighted inside each shot. Underneath sat the URL and the description, in the place where a normal search engine puts everything.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

It reviewed well as a demo. Ars Technica covered the hands-on in March 2008 and the comparison everybody reached for was the iPhone, which in 2008 was the highest compliment an interface could be paid. The results page also produced clusters of related categories along the side, so a broad query could be narrowed by topic rather than by adding more words to the box.

The company built other things off the same index. Wikiseek came first, in January 2007, searching Wikipedia along with everything Wikipedia linked out to. In October 2008 SearchMe bolted on music streaming, unlimited plays through Imeem's catalog, which is what a search company does when it is looking for a reason to be visited twice.

~ the decline ~

The complaints were specific and they were about the screenshots. SearchMe never told you how many results there were, so you had no way to know if you were looking at ten pages or a thousand. Danny Sullivan made the harder point in Search Engine Land, under a headline about being spared the eye candy: many of the thumbnails were too small to read, which meant you ended up judging a page by whether it looked well made rather than by what was on it, and looking well made is not the same as being right.

Then the arithmetic. The business needed roughly three million searches a day to break even, because rendering and storing a screenshot of every page in a billion-page index is expensive in a way that storing text is not. Advertising was the whole revenue plan and advertising pays per visit. Visits were the thing that never showed up.

~ the day it died ~

March 2009 brought 1.8 million visitors. May brought 600,000. That is a two-thirds fall in eight weeks, in the middle of a financial crisis, for a company whose costs scaled with the size of the index rather than with the number of people using it. Of forty five employees, thirty five were told they were going.

On 24 July 2009 Michael Arrington posted that SearchMe might go offline the next day and then updated the same piece to say it already had. The company had been shopping itself, the money did not arrive, and the servers could not be paid for. What was left went up for sale in pieces, the visual interface and the ranking work broken apart from the stack of patent applications and sold to whoever wanted them.

The idea did not die with the company. Every browser now shows you a grid of page thumbnails on a new tab, and every phone shows your open tabs as cards you flip through. SearchMe was right that people recognize pages by their shape. It was wrong that anybody would sit through a screenshot loading to find one.

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