Why did it disappear? Our company's new visual search engine sleagle.com also has large preview images for the webpages. We want to know what happen to searchme.com.
SearchMe was discontinued when the founders could not raise capital for marketing. They needed another 40-50 million (USD) for marketing as all their original capital, around 50 million was spent on the technology and servers. They were trying to negotiate with Google at the end (as their venture capital company was the same as Google's), but it did not work out and somehow Google managed to get a redirect from www.searchme.com to www.google.com (for the time being). While it was not much, this redirect provides Google with 100,000 - 200,000 additional visitors a day.
Redirects too google its temporary u mean they are going to be back ? Edit See http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/searchme-may-go-offline-tomorrow/
Searchme is a new search engine that uses visual search and category refinement. They think it will help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online. The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme’s chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories. The Searchme visual interface came about when Randy, a father of seven, helped his four- year-old son search for children’s web sites that he’d seen on TV. It struck Adams that if a search engine could show big pictures of the pages it found before users clicked through to a site, it’d be much easier to quickly find what they were looking for. After more than three years of engineering, imaging billions of web pages, and fine-tuning our approach many times over, Searchme was born. Source :- http://www.crunchbase.com/company/searchme