More betting on visual search: SearchMe raises another $12.6M

May 30, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

Like many people, I assume that Google is going to keep on taking over the search market. Not to be deterred, however, visual search company SearchMe has raised another $12.6 million on top of previous funding totalling $31 million, from some pretty interesting investors.

Venture firms participating in this round include Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Deepfork Capital and Lehman Brothers Venture Capital. Meanwhile, angels investors include Lachlan Murdoch — the elder son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch — along with Randy Adams, Thomas Banahan and Mark Kvamme.

Why do such big-name investors keep pumping money into the company when Google continues to take over search? One obvious reason is that talented and envious technologists of all stripes continue to eye Google’s enormous profitability, and imagine themselves getting even just one percent of it through a rival search engine. Even if their quest is near-impossible, the reward is proven and huge. That’s more than can be said about many segments of internet industries, like social networks or video-sharing sites.

Why SearchMe? Well, as we’ve covered, the company is run by repeat entrepreneurs who have played pivotal roles in Silicon Valley. Sequoia and these other investors love betting on a great team in a big market.

And SearchMe, in particular, is nice as far as non-Google search engines go, especially if you’re the visual type. You can scroll through a 3-D interface of search results, quickly flipping across result preview pages to find what you’re looking for by dragging the scroll tab at the bottom of the screen or using your keyboard arrow keys. Each result window comes with an excerpt that you can click on to go to the page. The interface, similar to the Cover Flow style on iTunes other Apple products, gives you more granularity into an individual search result than the list style of a Google result page.

Personally, though, I’m the impatient type. Google searches are fast, and it’s simple to scan search results for pages of interest, or try out fast new searches. Who am I to say, though. For visual searchers, another one to look at is SpaceTime, which you can read more about here.

As to the most important aspect of search, the accuracy, I haven’t found SearchMe to be noticeably better, although I haven’t used it enough to have a strong opinion.

That’s the thing. I’m stuck in my Google-y ways.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • agreed. i think it is neat and the visualization is nice, but it is simply a slower search tool and I do not think the return is there from Google fast results and clicking through some choices. I think it is probably a fantastic designer's search engine so you can find views of different ways people are attacking a topic from a design side.

    looking ahead, I would like to know how SearchMe is going to tackle the money problem. throwing ads into their engine, even text-based, is going to really hamper that nice clean look they have going.
  • Mike D
    Yo Lou - long time amigo. While monetization is an issue, I don't think it will be their issue. They'll probably be a strict technolgoy/talent acquisition long before they start ringing the cash register. Even if they do crack the code, 1% search share != 1% seach revenue (rounds to zero $). It's all about scale.

    We did some interviews/concept value test recently and presented Search Me to respondents. It proves very useful when there's a mass of low authority sites - good design correlates strongly (not perfectly) with good content. Saves a few trial and error clicks...
  • You anonymous Disqus user! Now I have to figure out which Mike D from a long time ago your are. Are you the Mike D from Sloan or the Mike D from About? Reveal yourself. :)

    Anyway, I don't disagree with your math, if they can capture a small share of search, there is revenue to be made. But two issues:

    1. Getting to 1% in a visual search model I find to be a challenge
    2. At some point, monetization model has to kick in and that means ads if they are going for share. And going to ads means having to impact the nice, smooth cover-flow design they have.
  • The problem is, if you grab 1% of the search market, how do you monetize it? By going to Google for ads. If Google doesn't want to deal with you, you are basically screwed. I mean, Yahoo has like 16% or whatever and they are still screwed.
  • Reminds me of flowww.com
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