Valley Chai

from what appeared as a cheap marketing tactic, i discovered an awesome search experience at SearchMe.com. i was looking up my followers on twitter, and it’s pretty usual to see random guys following me, two such people were tweeting about their company. just to check out how even junk like this works (and always curious about search), i went on to see what they’ve got.

(click on the image to enlarge - better yet go to their site!)

there are the sexy ones like mahalo.com, powerset.com, et al that get tons of press, but this is one of the best new search user experiences that i have ever seen in a while. not to mention a superb piece of user experience design.

first and foremost, it solves many real problems - we constantly go from one search result to another result only to to discover there is very little useful information in it. the summaries and excerpts are no good on most search engine result pages. the page titles are tuned to mislead you into clicking into the pages and many times, you wouldn’t even know what the page is about - e.g. a result on sleeplessness could be a medical journal, a self-help page, a health site, or a drug company page.

this search experience totally blows your mind in how easily one could flip through the search results - you immediately get a sense of the quality of the site, the content-to-junk ratio of the site, etc. in couple of seconds, you exactly know what site has the best promise of giving you the right information. they even show the relevant snippets on mouseover the page for easy readability of the page snapshot. of course it has room for improvement - such as zooming into the text like the iphone interface. but that might not be tough for these guys at all.

and then it gets better with video search experience - quite awesome. (check out http://www.searchme.com/Initial.html#/1/&pi=0/&q=reservoir dogs for example.)

with the google search user experience showing no meaningful chance of evolving and yahoo trying its best with search monkey, the field is getting wide open for new wave of innovations for search engines.. if only they can muster up enough muscle to add more pages to their index and beef up their ranking algorithms.

but the front-end/user-interface is the best, and this is where i’d start!