SearchMe

SearchMe, founded by Randy Adams and John Holland, is a visual search engine that launched into private beta in March 2008.

Searchme is a new search engine that uses visual search and category refinement. We 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 childrens web sites that hed 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. We’ve built it from the ground up to optimize it
for speed, but we still have a long way to go. We’re just getting started on our first steps toward
creating a smart new way to search today’s Web.