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I came across this new search engine, Search Me.  It’s visual-based, allowing you to see the site that relates to what you’re searching for.

For example, when I search on my name, the first site that comes up is my personal site (which is good).  As I scroll through, I find all kinds of things — like an old interview of me done more than 10 years ago! — and  some pages that have nothing to do with me (my name is so common!).

If you’re a Mac user, you’ll see that the view is nearly identical to that “Cover Flow” view in the Leopard OS.

Under the Preferences, you can do things like create a “day theme” which makes the background white rather than the “night theme”  (the default) which makes the background black.

You can also select “searchme lite” which gives a vertical column of pages with a white background.

The program allows the creation of “stacks” — kind of like bookmarks, but visual.  To use stacks, first create a stack name.  Then, each time you find a page that you’d like to save into a particular stack, you drag the page and drop it into that stack.  Then, the next time you’re on the site, you can look at your stack to see what’s updated on those pages.  Search Me provides some stacks.  Being a news junkie, I loaded up the News stack, which includes 13 news sites.  There are other news sites that I like checking out.  To add them, I opened each and then dragged and dropped each page directly onto the stack.  The stack tools section includes the ability to email the stacks, share them, and so on.  There is also video tutorials on the site explaining how to create and use stacks.

Here’s the “news”  stack which I copies from their example stacks.  (Caveat: the stack was working when I added it.  If you don’t see it, first give it a chance to load, then check to see if you have a Flash plugin, finally let me know as it’s posible that they changed the code.)   Under the “share” link in the Stacks section, there is an option to share to a blog, which is what I did here. There is information on their site on how to do this (basically grabbing the HTML code and putting it directly into the source of your blog page).

Important to note: The site is BETA, and it requires Flash.  That means that while most of it works, it’s still int the testing phase and is a bit buggy.  Also important to note, if you clear your Flash cache, you will lose your stacks.   Here’s a workaround:  (1) Email the stack to yourself; (2) open the email and click the link to see the stack in your Searchme browser window; (3) click the copy link within site to save it to your stack. A caveat:  I do not know how long the email link is good for.  For this reason, save any favorites the “old fashioned way” — in your bookmarks folder!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Computer-related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.