VentureBeat

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 Lehvan 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.

SearchMe is another search startup that wants to take on Google.

It is a visual search engine, that shows you results in a series of revolving panes, with each pane featuring a search result. In iTunes, this format is used to feature the covers of albums, not search results.

SearchMe also has other potentially useful features. It offers categories to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly. For example, if you type in “labrador puppies,” as seen in the demo video below, you can then additionally click on an icon for puppies to clarify that you’re not looking for information about a province of the Canadian government. If you want a list of SearchMe search results instead of the visual interface, you can drag open the list from the bottom of the screen.

I haven’t had a chance to test it out myself (the site is in private beta, you can sign up on its homepage), but Kara Swisher has a more in-depth look, here. She also notes that Google is experimenting with a similar project in its labs.

Here’s the company’s video demo:

This is the latest search product from the Mountain View company — it has raised $31 million from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Lehman Brothers, to date, so it has some room to experiment. VentureBeat readers may remember it first surfacing under the name Kavam, in early 2006 (our coverage), then launching a search engine for Wiki pages that was underwhelming compared to Google’s ability to search wiki pages (our coverage).

From my outside-the-private-beta perspective, the best thing the company has going for it is the experience of the founding team — which is probably the rationale behind the large amount of funding the company has received over the years. Specifically, chief executive and co-founder Randy Adams (LinkedIn profile here) has already founded and sold a number of successful companies including Emerald City Software, bought by Adobe Systems; the Internet Shopping Network, bought by the Home Shopping Network; Navitel Communications, bought by Spyglass, Inc.; and more. In fact, Sequoia owes him one — he helped introduce Sequoia to Yahoo, which led to the firm’s initial investment in the company. Then he served on Yahoo’s board of directors during the first year of its operation. Some more details here.

Round-up of the latest in Silicon Valley tech stuff:

Google-funded genetic start-up? — Anne Wojcicki, the biotech analyst who is reportedly engaged to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has co-founded a Mountain View personal genetics startup, 23andMe, according to ValleyWag. According to the company’s site, it develops “tools and producing content to help people make sense of their genetic information. Our goal is to take advantage of new genotyping technologies and help consumers explore their genetics, informed by cutting edge science. We are now looking for talented, innovative individuals…”

How Yahoo blew it — In 2002, Yahoo was still bigger than Google, and was mulling over whether it should acquire the fast-growing company, but Yahoo chief exec Terry Semel choked, at least according to this Wired account by Fred Vogelstein:

“Five billion dollars, 7 billion, 10 billion. I don’t know what they’re really worth — and you don’t either,” he told his staff. “There’s no fucking way we’re going to do this!”

SearchMe launches yet another search engine — Palo Alto start-up, SearchMe has launched WikiSeek, which sounded useful when we first found out about it: It would index only Wikipedia sites, along with sites linked to by Wikipedia. Theoretically, that means only very useful links and little spam. We were let down, though, after trying a few searches. In at least this search, there was more spam than in Google’s equivalent search. We’ll see what else the two-year-old Palo Alto company comes up with; it has $5 million from Sequoia, and apparently it has more up its sleeve.

Moore’s Law intact after all? — Hewlett-Packard computer scientists say they’ve made elements of computer chips so small that they may enable an eightfold increase in the number of transistors on a chip, without making the transistors smaller, reports the Merc’s Therese Poletti. The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore’s Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years. The validity of the law has been doubted recently, as we near the technical limits of making chips smaller.

Twilight Years for Silicon Valley legend — John Draper helped the young Apple co-founders with pranks, for example telling them how to create phone tones so they could make free long-distance calls. The WSJ embellishes, somewhat strangely, the story of his subsequent years (sub required).

Microsoft makes Windows Vista OS available for sale and download online — A first for Microsoft. Details.

How Myspace succeeded, in spite of itself – i.e, the bugs, crass design, disorder.