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.

How would you describe Searchme.com?

Searchme is the evolution of search. If you think about it, there hasn’t been much change in the search experience over the past decade. With the big, traditional search engines, you type in a search query and what you see is a list of blue links. Maybe you’ll get a title and a brief description, but that list of blue links doesn’t really show you what’s happening on the web. That was fine back in the late ’90s because not everyone had a fast connection to the Internet. But the world – the Internet – is different now.

The web has evolved. Everyone has broadband. The Internet is rich with videos and music and images. Searchme is all about providing a better search experience based on how we consume the Internet today and into the future.

What makes you any different?

We’re providing a very visual search experience. Instead of a list of blue links, you actually get large images of actual web pages, videos or music that you can flip through in a very slick page-flow format. It’s similar to how you’d flip through a magazine.

We’re really proud to be the first major search engine to deliver blended multimedia search results. You type in your query and you’ll get back full-sized video, images, music, web pages – even Twitter results – all organized by their relevance and playable right inside the search results page. The reason we’re so excited about this is that we’re the only ones right now who have created a search experience that really shows off the wealth of rich media that’s available on the web today.

Why do you think you can succeed where other search engine upstarts have failed?

We have an extraordinary team of experts that came to us from Yahoo, Ask, Overture, Inktomi and Adobe. They take their deep knowledge of search, from technical to design, and use it to push the envelope in a field that is far from fully developed. Just as the Internet is continuously evolving, search needs to evolve to provide users with an experience that reflects the nature of the web. Our investors fully understand the opportunity we have in search. Today, just 1 percent market share in search is estimated to be worth up to $3 billion.

What kind of feedback are you getting? From users? From advertisers?

The ability to see what you are looking for, before you comb through a list of links, is critical for users. Advertisers see value here as well because they can more effectively target content to users who are more likely to be interested in it.

Our users also love how Searchme makes the search experience more social. People love to share what they find with their friends and family. So features like our one-click Twitter button and the ability to post search results on Facebook and other social networks has gotten a lot of love from our users.

From an advertiser perspective, we are blending the benefits of display ads with search advertising in a CPC model. Advertisers love the advantage of branding exposure they get while paying on ROI instead of frequency. We believe this is the next generation of online advertising and it delivers more value to both the advertiser and users.

Why is ‘visual search’ a good thing for advertisers?

We’ve got a very compelling story for brands and agencies. We just finished a very successful beta program where we had a core group of 18 agencies testing out the Searchme Ad Platform. We offer PPC, paid inclusion and sponsored search. The Searchme Ad Platform enables keyword-based ads to be placed within search results and the advantage is that ads are presented in our visual page flow rather than in a list of static blue links. So the fact that people see a full-sized rendering of each advertiser’s page before clicking through provides a more highly qualified click and increases the likelihood of conversion.

What are the biggest hurdles in starting a new search engine from scratch?

One of the greatest hurdles has been starting in essence from scratch. As you can imagine, building a search engine from the ground up is challenging. We’ve spent over three years in this process and continue to develop our engine. But interestingly, that is also one of our greatest assets. When traditional search engines want to make changes or improvements, they need to build on top of what they have; they aren’t able to easily make changes on a grand scale because their systems don’t support newer technologies. At Searchme, we have the benefit of implementing technologies like Flash that are more commonly used online and more up-to-date than those used by other search engines.

What do you see as the future of search?

The web is undergoing a significant evolution due to the advent and adoption of high speed access across the US. This has led to an increase in the availability of rich media and a shift in user habits from watching TV to spending more time online than on any other media outlet. This newly evolved user behavior demonstrates the need for multimedia search as the gateway to the immense amounts of rich media now available online. We’re seeing this today with the average time spent on Searchme consistently increasing month over month and deeper engagements for consumers with more results than on traditional search engines. We see the future of search moving to your living room, as a 10ft experience from your couch. We see search being integrated in set top boxes and TV’s as soon as the 4th quarter of this year — and with Searchme’s superior, visual experience, we believe it is well positioned for this evolution.

What does the future hold for SearchMe?

The future is bright, because the foundation we’ve built is so strong. The flexibility of our technology base gives us the ability to explore and build new ways to deliver search results as the Internet continues to evolve. In addition to embedded graphical content, we’ve got a few really exciting developments coming up at Searchme this summer. I can’t share all our secrets, but I can say that we intend to remain on the leading edge of search for a long time to come.

Check out SearchMe for yourself here – SearchMe

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