How many times have you searched for something on the internet only to click away as soon as you choose a result because the site is awful, has eye burning colours or worse, displays unsavoury content?
Modern search engines up till now have only given the user the chance to read text about the website they are about to click on and actually have no idea of what will be presented to them when they visit the site.
Well all this might change in the not too distant future as a new type of search engine has been launched that allows the user to preview a screen shot of the website representing the search results that the user requested.
Searchme.com is currently running a trial of it’s new visual based search engine and very nicely presents the screen shots for you to flick through much like pages in a book but you can still see the text results as well if you wish.
search me screen print
In addition they are having a good go at getting categories working so if you search for ‘cat’ for instance they will then show categories of searches relevant to cats i.e. catfish, cat food, cat products etc. It’s only working for US based searches at the moment but it’s sure to come to the uK in no time at all.
So with this in mind where does it leave websites that are less than appealing to the discerning customer? Well it doesn’t look good if we’re honest. This is of course only touching on the subject of visual searching but if things go this way which they no doubt will then there’s never been a better time to make sure your website looks really professional and doesn’t scare people away because you wont get a second chance to make a first impression.
for more information then try searchme.com
Posted on April 20th, 2008
