Do away with boring text search and see what you’re looking for.

That’s the thrust of visual search from SearchMe, a startup search engine currently in public beta that offers you something a bit different, and visually more attractive, in your online searching.

The company has been around for some years. See this post on TechCrunch for detailed information including about the recent financial backing.

I’ve noticed the name quite a bit recently as I see it frequently in my server stats (this blog is obviously being indexed by SearchMe).

I tried SearchMe on something quite simple – my name.

Given that SearchMe readily acknowledges that their index is small – “less than a billion documents,” they say, so small is relative – I wasn’t really expecting much of a result.

Quite a surprise, though, to see the scope of the results, as the screenshot above shows. I found websites, blogs and references to me all over the place.

You navigate through the search results images with your cursor keys or simply click directly on one of them. Very simple and a pleasure to use.

If you make use of the Windows Flip 3D features of Windows Vista as I do, this behaviour will be familiar to you.

It’s a far more attractive way of searching than the traditional text-only way such as with Google.

But how do they compare, though? It’s all very well having a pretty and visual method but if it doesn’t give you the results you want, it’s not much good.

Well, my simple experiment is simple indeed. But it produced the result I wanted. Indeed, more than I was expecting.

More information on the rather good SearchMe blog.

One day, all search will be like this.