Searchme is a visual search app for Nokia S60 mobiles. Not a full web browser, it works more like the built-in search function – a 'helper' app giving a simple and quick interface to a search engine without firing up the web browser and navigating to the right page or bookmark.
Where the built-in app concentrates on data trawling (and is geared towards searching your personal data as well as the web) Searchme is all about presenting web searches in a slick, at-a-glance way not unlike Apple's Cover Flow. The app is a client for the full Searchme.com search engine, which uses the same Cover Flow-inspired interface to give quick previews of search results.
On firing up the app, you are asked for your first search term. Searchme will then acquire a connection (3G or wifi, its not fussy) and slurp down a handful of results from its search engine. Rather than display them in a big list - like, say, Google - Searchme spends a little longer actually going to each page and grabbing a low-resolution screenshot of the page contents. It then arranges these in pseudo-Cover Flow style as thumbnails you can flip through using the D-Pad.
The thumbnail system works quite well (actually rather better than the proper Searchme website, which uses a slightly clunky Flash interface) and you can quickly flip between snapshots and zoom in the see more detail. You can't really read much from each page - and I suspect they use a caching system, so there is no guarantee that the thumbnail will depict the current content on a rapidly-updated page - so to see more you need to select 'Open' and have Searchme launch the S60 browser.
The app's biggest weakness is probably the Searchme back-end. This is partly a perceptual problem, but whereas I would trust Google, Yahoo, etc. to provide a comprehensive search of the web, Searchme's focus on presentation restricts each search to a handful of results and I was always left with the feeling that there were probably several hundred other pages that I wasn't being shown - any of which might be better than the five or six that I was.
That said, being able to quickly see the contents of a search result does make searching a little faster and quite fun. You can perform image searches too, the effect of which is like having an unlimited number of photos in your phone's gallery. Its a clever way to present earch results and with perhaps just a little more focus on what those results actually are, this could be a winner.
Details
Size: 0.138 MB
Price: Free
Check out the Searchme review image gallery:
