Searchme.com Not A Tool But A Gimmick
Searchme.com has been around for a while, "The Great Kate Delaney" actually called to tell me about the tool as she interviewed the CEO. I remember clearly as my browser rendered the flash heavy homepage as I could hear excitement in Kate's voice as she explained the tool. It was true, it was a nice site, eye candy rich and I understood the excitement. It was cool, first glance. In terms of usability, it fails miserably alas, it's a toy.
I recently got a flyby pitch on facebook about Searchme.com. So, I figured, it's been quite a while let's see if they have refined the site....
To my horror, it was absolutely uglier and more unusable than I could have imagined. I guess this is improvement in the reverse. See, the problem is not only is it a total flash site as you can not cut/paste found results, yes its' monolithic. You enter a search term such as "Yankees" and you get a cute, Eye flashy, iTunes scrollable album cover of your intended search results.
The presentation is simply cumbersome. It's so busy with ads, sport stats and that obnoxious "Results" link box to the left is not easy to understand, what's it telling me? It is not intuitive at all, which is confusing. The assumption that is made is the developers where attempting an Apple iTunish look-n-feel. It is not clear to the masses that clicking the album frame to the right brings up the NEXT webpage results. From this point you can click the left/right albums to go into the direction results as you see fit. However, 1 result at a time.
That's correct, the next (1), 1 entire page per Ssearch result. ... Just 1 at a time? Speed reading and researching just can't co-exist in this framework. I need speed, cute in research will give you a head ache regardless if that is researching the best place to by a hammer, telescope or understanding what effects zyolites have on a human's chemistry.
Here's the problem, Google is a very efficient tool. It's hard to get to the next level... It's attainable, but Searchme.com is not the tool. Google is text based, presents minimal information that gets the point across. It's second nature form most and just intuitive the way it stands today. I am all for improvement, but not obscurity from the next generation. How do you get to the next generation? You fight for it, run towards it, test, monitor, test monitor, try, try try and never give up.
Google is nothing more, nothing less, but search results in a damn fast manner to your query. Google's simplicity is it's genius. It may very well be the Internet's zipper technology. Remember how Velcro was going to take the zipper out? Still using zipper's today, well maybe? Point is, there is hope for a breakthrough, but a rearrangement of old technologies, Flash in this case, is not a breakthrough.
Searchme.com's "Results" link box at the top left have been the the best thing about the site, but you can't cut/paste or drag... It's not text!! There is no way to list, drag and pull, open tabs for the links of interest. Searchme.com clearly is attempting to catch the wave of iTunes' EyeCandy to monetize through the mass social flocking, this just doesn't work.... Unfortunately, for Searchme.com the result maybe a Mass Social Exodus...
Flat out, put a researcher on Google and then on Searchme.com and give them about 10 minutes to use each. The complaints for Searchme.com will start in about thirty seconds flat.
Searchme.com has a lot of effort in this product, no doubt. I am sure the developers are crack shot developers and they have done a good job of what was produced. That does not make them crack shot usability experts, and this is clearly displayed here. The idea, at first may have been good and well received. However, in practice, it just doesn't work.. It's too busy, not functional and cumbersome to use...
Where do they go from here? That's a great question, the next generation of search is an entire subject and it has to do with a proper lexicon, taxonomy and pre-cognition of the person making queries. By obscuring the issues with graphics, cumbersome interfaces and user confusion I fear technologies with this direction will miss the boat.
All in all, Google still drives the fast, efficient and highly usable search technology today. Making things cute and lovable has its place but it's not in a search engine. Searching is a means of communication. Most people don't want to wait for a dial tone, oh wait, there are no dial tones on mobile phone...Right? My point...
Be terse, resolve fast and deliver more... The three most important directives of a search engine and Google executes this exquisitely. The only other directive would be infer which is underway...
Move off the graphics1, move back to text, and solve the "Deep Web" problem as today Searchme.com does not add to the solution but obscures it...
| 1 | That's not to say graphics have no place in search. Certainly, graphic identification is available and will be used in future search, its the obsucrity of the results due to the layout of graphic; which in fact is an entire issue on to itself. |