As the amount of information continues to grow on the internet, it is becoming harder and harder to find stuff.

As you know, necessity is the mother of all innovation. I recently ran into searchme.com (thanks to Kim F. for the heads-up). Basically, searchme.com is a visual search engine. That’s right, a visual search engine.

This is how it works: you type in your search phrase and press enter. What happens next is a hybrid between the iTunes music slider and ask.com’s website preview option. And then some. Here are some of the neat features that I noticed right away:

• No pagination – search results are loaded right on the page using AJAX, and they keep loading as you keep scrolling
• Highlight keywords – each search result image highlights the keywords matching your search criteria
• Traditional results – this tool also allows you to toggle between full screen visual search results and traditional text-based search results

You have to play with it to really understand how it works. I highly encourage you to test it out and think about how web design can change if this catches on… how can this change search engine optimization?

Remeber, the eye and the mind can process images a lot faster than it can process text. People also gravitate towards “credible” websites. Credibility is instantaneously established when a user looks at the page’s design. All these factors stack on the side of searchme.com. Let’s keep an eye on these guys and see where this goes.

Labels: Design, search engine optimization, search engines, usability