Searchme = Thrill Me! A quick review of the searchme.com RIA experience

Last weekend I received an email from a good friend, long-time business associate, regarding the launch of a new Web application that he and the team at Adobe Consulting have helped to produce.

This new Web property is called "Searchme". As described on their Web site, "Searchme lets you see what you're searching for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you'll see pictures of web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you're looking for, before you click through."

Clearly this email email stimulated some interest in me, and after reading Searchme's self-description, I was rather interested. After signing up for the public beta, I ended up getting fast-tracked with a user account. Having played with the tool for a week now, I am quite impressed with Searchme's overall experience.

Let's break the Beta down:

When thinking about why I liked the searchme.com experience so much, I decided to break things down into the following high-level categories. I suppose these also apply to "search" in general.

• Quality of Results
• Efficiency
• Enjoyability

Searchme.com scores very well in all three categories, as far as I am concerned. Let's start with the most important topic, being the quality of the search results.

Quality of Results

We all know that Google climbed to the top of the search engine mountain because they learned how to return rock-solid results to users on each and every search. This is no trivial task, and Searchme seems to be doing a fairly good job at it also. There is, however, a difference between Searchme.com's search user scenario and that of Google.

Searchme is visual, playful and enjoyable. Searchme allows the user to type a query, and upon doing so, returns a list of category matches. The user then clicks a the category that most closely relates to the concept that they were searching for, and then the results load on the screen.

This secondary search step could potentially be a very bad experience, however because of the "rich" nature of the user interface and the elegant way in which it is delivered, the potential for annoyance is reduced to a minimum. The fact that this pre-filtering happens means that your actual search results are generally right in line with the type of information you are seeking out.


Efficiency

Even if an online search application were to provide perfect results, I doubt it would gain wide acceptance by the online community if it wasn't fast. For today's search user, speed is almost as important as accuracy.

Searchme.com is blazing fast. This might be what impressed me the most. This thing is speedy!
So fast, in fact, that even with the heavier (than HTML) Flex user interface (Flash player), the application performed search queries and returned results in a split second. This is especially impressive when considering the graphical nature of the user interface.

Without knowing the system's architecture, I can only make assumptions as to what contributes to the speed at which it performs. I have to believe that we are talking about a highly optimized back-end, and a very, very, very tweaked Flex GUI.

I love Flex, but I also know that something that is this sophisticated has had to have gone through a lot of iterations of performance tuning to make it perform this well.

Kudos to both Adobe Labs and Searchme's engineering folks. The reason nobody has been able to launch a search engine with an interface this clever before is most likely due to performance.

Who cares how "cool" the UI is. If it drags your computer down or performs so slowly it is just annoying to use, all of the eye candy associated with the look and feel becomes secondary.


Enjoyability

I know. I know. It's a weird and subjective term. I use it though, and personally that the enjoyability factor behind digital experiences summarizes the overall value that they bring to users. If people "like it", they will use it, they will connect with it, and they will recommend it to others.

Searchme.com is enjoyable. Of course the speed of use and quality of search results lend to the overall enjoyability rating. Searchme, however, takes search to a new level by presenting the search results in a rich, visual and playful way.

Similar to, but not a direct copy of Apple's "Coverflow", this application shows results as page thumbnails and allows the user to page through them.

This was a risky approach, but it paid off.

The challenge from a technology perspective is to make the flipping action as fast and fluid as possible. Dare I say that this needs to exceed the expectations of the user in order to become a real winner. The 3-d pages fly through the interface, and are loaded in batches so the user can immediately begin exploring search results while the entire list of results loads in the background.

It isn't a new concept, but the team at Adobe really pulled it off in the most perfect of ways. It is smooth, fluid, quick, and works better than expected. I can't say that I envy the developer(s) that had to work on this, because it is apparent that a lot of time went into iterating through this until it was perfect.


Let's take a look

Initial Screen: Search Box

Just as you'd expect: A single text input box and a very fitting marketing tagline "You'll know it when you see it". They nailed a complete overview of the application in that single line. The genius behind searchme.com is the visual nature of the search results...


Secondary Action: Select Category

The "rich" experience gets underway! As soon as you type your query into the search box, a list of matching potential category matches is displayed. For this example, I typed in "Roundarch" as the search query. As soon as I did, the following category icons appeared: "software, architecture, work & career, web development, advertising & marketing". In this example, I chose "web development".

View Search Results

Once the user clicks on a category, the user inteface changes to what you see here. It is expanded by default, and provides a very nice, clean and visual way for the end-user to view screen shots of the pages in the search result collection. This initial display shows off the 3-d perspective view of the search results pages, where a user can "flip" through them, much like the ever popular Apple Coverflow UI.

View Search Results (part 2)

In this view, all I've done is grab the "scrubber" below the screen shot and pulled it towards the top of the screen. This shrinks the search result thumbnails and reveals a text-based search result panel that directly correlates to the visual results at the top of the UI.

View Search Results (part 3)

This screen shot shows the UI after the user scrolls into the search results. The UI now displays the screen shots on both the left and right of the selected search result item, along with the corresponding text-based results below. As you move the top of the screen left or right, the bottom area scrolls through results creating a 1-to-1 match between the visual results and the text results.

Launch a Page

Finally, now that the user has chosen an item that looks right to them, they click the captured image of the Web page, or they can click the hyperlink in the text-based list of search results. This loads the new page in the same browser window, bringing the user to the content that they've selected for viewing.


Watch the Searchme.com Demo

User Experience Highlights

Lastly, I wanted to just recap some of the things that Searchme.com has incorporated into the experience that I feel make it such a refined rich internet application:

1. Capturing the "back" and "forward" buttons within the browser so users can use them to control the experience. Many RIAs forget this, leading to a potentially annoying experience.
2. Displays search results in both visual and textual forms.
   
3. The visual nature of the display allows users to easily seek out, identify and confirm that a "page" in the results contains the content that they are seeking. While not 100% accurate, a user can visually relate the page layout, etc to what they were after when typing the search query.
4. The screen captures actually display the highlighted search term on top of the image itself. this is fascinating and I don't know how they've accomplished this, but it works.

Here are a handful of other articles and information resources regarding the Searchme.com application:

• http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080311/aqtu068.html?.v=37
  
  
• http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/11/paidcontent/main3926431.shtml
  
  
• http://www.betanews.com/article/Searchme_launches_private_beta_with_help_from_Adobe/1205254500
  
  
• http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9890911-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
  
  
• http://www.searchme.com/press/releases/Searchme_Launches_Private_Beta_of_New_Visual_Search_Engine.php
  
  
• http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080311/searchme-a-new-visual-search-engine/