Welcome back to The netGuide, where I talk briefly about some of my findings from across the web and how they help solve old problems in new and creative ways. This week…

We’re going to investigate the idea of search and information management with searchme.com, a great search engine that has quietly made its way onto the scene, but which has unique advantages to search.

What’s special about this search engine is that when you query a topic, the websites returned to you are displayed visually (similar to Apple’s cover flow) rather than in list form. A picture is worth 1000 words so they say, so it makes sense that with 1 quick look at the preview pane of a website, you can better filter your results, and roughly gauge the quality of the website (by it’s professionalism and aesthetic, available content, and general message). It’s clear that you receive less information about all items, relative to each other, in one glance than with traditional search engines like Google, however what you do see, you are given more information about – this represents the tradeoff between these two methods of search. The obvious benefit is the handling of media search, such as video and images, which you can view in pane, as opposed to Google’s one page of smaller pictures (which does not handle video search well). The second benefit is not quite as obvious and speaks in large part, to how we interact with the Internet at large…

In order to understand this other value proposition of searchme, we need to go on a tangent, and understand the most basic function of the Internet: it provides people with access to information. Internet users become satisfied with a website when it matches them with (good) information that they are interested in, and the variables that moderate satsifaction are, the breadth of accessible information and its quality.

When people use the Internet they either know where to find something (e.g. a specific address) or they don’t, and need to use tools to help reach that result (e.g. search engines, news aggregators, social media, etc.). These tools range in scope and function – some of them deliver information to you without asking for anything in particular (e.g. digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, popurls), while search engines require you to specifically choose a direction (content topic) to initiate your search. Although there is a clear distinction between these two approaches, I want to focus less on how these tools mechanically distribute content and more on how they help us achieve our end goal, which is the information-interest match. Central to this discussion is the idea that it doesn’t matter whether you originally intended to find TopicXYZ on the Internet, as long as the TopicXYZ that finds you is something that you value.

Returning to searchme, the second benefit is that you can ‘dive into’ a website and explore it in a small way without making the time investment of clicking on the link (regardless of how small). This means that you’re getting more exposure to the various websites on the Internet, and their respective content, and as a result, you are more likely to find websites that you otherwise wouldn’t have discovered because you imperfectly filtered them before making contact. There is a lost world of websites to be discovered this way.

What are your thoughts about searchme and it’s applications? What do you like or not like about it?