Searchme Android application review – Visual mobile search

Overview: Today I’m going to look at a relatively new Android G1 application called “Searchme”. This application is the mobile version of the semi-popular search engine by the same name. But what really sets it and this application apart is that it’s a visual search engine, not just blocks of text.

Functionality: When you boot up the application you’ll just have a search box and a drop-down on what to sort by: Web (default), Video, Images, and News. All are pretty self-explanatory. Once you choose a category and type in your search term you may notice some subcategories popping up before you hit enter if you are using Web or News search. These let you narrow down your criteria and locations even further, giving you a pretty specific range of results.

Once you make those selections you can finally continue to the main functionality of this service, the actual search results. Instead of breaking up a list of links and a short description, instead you are shown a picture of each of the sites along with a URL. The service will load images of each of the results on a different “card” that you can easily navigate through. Occasionally, the service does have some pretty long loading times. Once you have found a good looking result you can double-tap the pictures of the sites to bring up a larger view, but the images are a bit too low resolution to be readable most of the time, even when zooming in. Of course, you can always click on the links at the bottom of each slide and it will open your browser to the site, or play the video in the built-in youtube player.

Aside from the main functionality, there isn’t much in the way of extras or settings. The only options are a toggle for safe search and one for spelling suggestions. In my experience, turn the spelling suggestions off unless you are just a terrible speller, it seems to only make things more troublesome.

My big problem though is the actual results. As a search engine, I frankly find that it is pretty slow to update and frequently doesn’t generate good results, but that’s more of a function of the service than with this application. So really, don’t expect this to replace your standard google search.

Look and Feel: An increasingly common trend with Android applications is a very bland and boring interface. Nothing really new going on here, and for the most part it’s just text and pictures on a black background, although that is how their normal site looks for the most part as well.

I do wish the interface had one small improvement though, and that’s the link color below the site images. As it is currently, it’s the standard Internet blue link color which does not contrast well with the black background. I think they should take a note from the real version of their service and instead pick a lighter shade that would stick out more.

Conclusion: This is a very cool idea that has good execution on the platform, I do think it could use some work visually. Additionally I think it needs some improvements on search quality in general.