“I like it better than Google…” (Cue the Darth Vader music.)

21 April 2008 | Internet, Marketing, Media | Comments

At our last week’s ad:tech SF, Drew Ianni premiered some screenshots of SearchMe, a new engine financed by, among others, Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital. (It’s an open beta so go sign up right away.)

SearchMe, a bit like the Windows Vista operating system, is a highly graphical search engine that displays screenshots of results pages rather than just snippets a la Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask. Displaying data this way is as big a difference from what the other search engines do as the first Apple GUI (graphical user interface) was over the old MS/DOS table-and-column system. The results hit the user instantly and at a more intuitive level. For example, when I searched “Kvamme” on Google the first result was highly relevant: “Mark D. Kvamme - Venture Capitalist - Sequoia Capital.” However, I still had to read the results.

On SearchMe, though, when I searched “Kvamme” the first result was a full screenshot of an anthropologiet named Kenneth L. Kvamme.

The part of the brain that processes images works more efficiently than the part of the brain that parses words, so I knew faster with SearchMe that I had the wrong result (and that the right result was one image to the right, since there was a nice photo of Mark Kvamme) than I knew with Google that I had the right result. I’m guessing that this has something to do with the primitive core of the brain using image-recognition to track potential predators versus the higher civilation of reading (I’ll ask Joseph Carrabis to comment on this… Joseph, please?).

Later, I was showing SearchMe to a friend who does not work in the interactive industry. Her response after two whole seconds? “I like it better than Google.” If I hadn’t seen how seamlessly SearchMe works and felt how satisfying it is for myself, I’d have fallen off my chair when I heard this.

That comment took me back to a conversation I had at ad:tech (alas, with whom I cannot recall) in which my companion and I were recognizing that Google, for all it’s incredible technology and market cap, really has only its search product as a differentiator.  Yes, I admit that I use Gmail, iGoogle and Grand Central, but it wouldn’t take that much for me to abandon Gmail in favor of any similar email service (I also use Yahoo, for example), to trade in my iGoogle page for a NetVibes page (I’ve been thinking of doing that anyway); and while Grand Central is hugely convenient I probably wouldn’t pay more than a few dollars a month for it if it ever turned from free to fee. I’d even argue that Ask has several better features than Google, but the increase is not sufficient for me to have changed the search engine default in my brain and on my Firefox toolbar.

In other words, while Google is formidable and has changed the world, we said the same thing about Yahoo before Google came around. There hasn’t been a markedly better search engine since Google.

But now, with SearchMe, there might be.

Using SearchMe, I intuitively love the experience. But what I want to know, what I’m curious about, is the revenue model.  What is it?  So far, there are no sponsored listings, and sponsored listings (invented by Overture back when it was GoTo) are at the heart of Google’s success. (If this paragraph is gobbledygook to you, read John Battelle’s book, “The Search.”)

I urge you to check out SearchMe, and stay tuned for more.