In a world dominated by Google and Bing headlines, we decided to take a peek at an alternative search engine and see where they see the future of search. Founded by industry veteran Randy Adams and John Holland, SearchMe is a visual search engine that launched into private beta in March 2008.

From CrunchBase:

Searchme is a new search engine that uses visual search and category refinement to help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online. The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme’s chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories. The Searchme visual interface came about when Randy, a father of seven, helped his four- year-old son search for children’s web sites that he’d seen on TV. It struck Adams that if a search engine could show big pictures of the pages it found before users clicked through to a site, it’d be much easier to quickly find what they were looking for. After more than three years of engineering, imaging billions of web pages, and fine-tuning our approach many times over, Searchme was born. We’ve built it from the ground up to optimize it for speed, but we still have a long way to go. We’re just getting started on our first steps toward creating a smart new way to search today’s Web.

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Have you ever wondered if you are doing enough updates to your website, or what those updates should be?  Before you look at making changes to your site it is really essential to understand what your goals are and how they are converting.  A conversion happens when a visitor to your website performs an intended action.  Your conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors to your website that complete the desired action compared to the total number of visitors to your website.  It is important that you define your conversions so that they are consistent with your broader business objectives.  For example, your business goals might involve maximizing your profits, increasing sales, generating leads, and improving customer communication.  Therefore you may measure a conversion as a customer purchasing something from your website, completing your contact form, subscribing to your newsletter or registering to become a member of your website.  In order to optimize your website to improve conversions you need a tool that can measure how changes to your website affect the way visitors convert on your desired actions.  Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that allows you to setup tests to confirm that changes you make to your website are having a positive impact.

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Over the past couple weeks there has been a bit of excitement around the new iPhone and the resurgence of Palm with the release of the Palm Pre.

The Palm Pre is being looked at by some as Palm’s savior as it’s their first device equipped to compete with the heavyweights of today since the days of the Treo 600 & 700 models.  The Pre boasts a full HTML browser, email access, GPS, WIFI access, music, video and a host of other features on Palm’s new Linux derived operating system.  Analysts are forecasting about 100,000 units were sold in the first weekend of its launch.

The new iPhone 3GS is a an expansion of the previous model (iPhone 3G) with some new features such as video recording/editing, voice control, larger storage, and an upgrade to the processor making it two times faster than the previous model.  Apple has reported a million plus sales of the new phone since its launch this past weekend.  The new 3GS is available for $199 and the 3G model is now being offered for $99.

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I know from the title alone that people are scratching their heads and wondering how the heck I could apply the title of “David” to a behemoth of a company like Microsoft.  I can because Microsoft last week announced a civil suit that they have filed against three individuals that they accuse of participating in click fraud on the MSN ad platform.  Microsoft is the “David” because Click Fraud (now turned into an entity by this post) is huge in the search industry, and though we deal with it, sweep it under the rug, pretend it is not there, etc. it is the “Goliath”.  The civil suit that Microsoft filed is less than one million dollars (as you read, know that I am touching my pinky finger to the corner of my mouth and looking evil), but will reap much, much more.  The PR alone, when we are all evangelizing about Bing, is enough to keep the momentum going for Microsoft.

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Are the days of blue links gone? Are the days of traditional SERP pages history? These are the first two questions that I asked myself when I entered my first search query into Searchme. Immediately, I was presented a blend of multimedia search results that consisted of full size web pages that I could flip through, similar to flipping through a magazine. Searchme is the first search engine that allows searchers to see what they are searching for by providing images of actual web pages, which helps consumers know what they are getting before they click on an ad; searchers get to try before they buy. Another great feature about Searchme is their one-click Twitter button and the ability to post search results on Facebook, as well as other social networks, which makes sharing your search results with your friends that much easier.

What does this mean for search marketers? The Searchme Ad Platform allows key-word based ads to be placed within search results. This means that ads are presented as visual views. For search marketers, it allows the inclusion of more design concepts into their campaigns. What does this mean for search marketers? First, it means more qualified clicks, as searchers are able to see the web page before clicking on it. Secondly, it means that there is an increased chance of a conversion.

You can learn more about Searchme and hear what GroupM Search’s, Chris Westmeyer, has to say about the search engine in Search Engine Watch’s article here.

Stay tuned, as Chris will be sharing a Searchme Q&A session that he had with Searchme CEO and Founder, Randy Adams.

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