Top 5 Most Popular Searchme Feature Requests
As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, our beta testers are giving us tons of excellent feedback, including hundreds of feature suggestions. Thank you so much for all your great ideas!
I thought it would be fun to post the Top 5 most popular feature requests. Here they are, in Letterman order:
5. Image Search. Obviously a no-brainer for visual search, and we’re working on it. (Hint: We already download all those images anyway, right?!) And wouldn’t it be cool with photo communities? Stay tuned.
4. Magnifying Lens. This one caught me by surprise. Our images are big enough to display headlines, images and brands, but due to physical screen size and resolution, you just can’t read the text. (Yet!) So a lot of folks suggested that we create a magnifying lens that magnifies the pages. There are lots of ways this could implemented, but we want to keep it really simple. Let us know how you’d do it - leave us a comment!
3. Numbered Results. Visual search is truly a different paradigm, and we don’t have plans to number results as a default option. But so many people requested this feature that I think it would make a great option in our settings. I’m definitely passing this one on to our user experience team!
2. International. Planet Earth is hungry for Searchme! We’ve had gazillions of inquiries about when Searchme would be available in specific languages and nations. We are so flattered and so eager to bring Searchme to the world. We haven’t announced specifics, but we are definitely moving forward on several international initiatives. Hang in there, international users are very important to us!
1. Scroll Wheel/Trackpad Support. Man, you guys are speed demons, aren’t you? This was by far the biggest feature request that we haven’t implemented yet. We understand your need for speed: It’s super fun to watch those pages whiz by! So hang on, we’re working on it, and it will be cool. By the way, trackpad support sounds an awful lot like “touch”, doesn’t it?
Thanks so much for the ideas, and keep up the great feedback!
From the Blogosphere
Whenever we see an interesting blog post about us, we’ll post it here, in our “From the Blogosphere” section.
SearchMe Gets an “A” for Innovation, Even If That Innovation Was Obvious
Over at bigoak blog, Will Paoletto is more impressed with our categorization than our visual display of results. Personally, I like how we show results, but it warms my heart to see him looking under the hood at our category feature. Thanks for giving us some of your cycles, Will!
If you’ve got a blog, write about us - we may well post it here!
Thanks!
John
April 4th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
I have a few thoughts but first want to say great job!
My question is about number 4, which I had some thoughts on myself. Is it legal to read websites content off-site like that? I wonder because you technically don’t need to visit the site then. If this new medium of search went revolutionary and people viewed content from in the search engine then site stats would become less meaingful.
The first time I took SearchMe for a test spin I immediately leaned in and said gosh that’s almost readable. Because I don’t know the rules and I think some people would be unhappy with the magnifying idea, I was thinking about ways for SearchMe to encourage searchers to visit the websites shown in the results instead.
I started thinking about color gradients in Photoshop and thought what if there was a tool for image resolution that transitions from clear to slightly unreadable? For example you would clearly see the brand or logo and part of the page to begin reading the content of the result, but to finish reading searchers would have to visit the actual website. A little bit of a teaser…
Like I said I don’t know the rule surrounding the issue but I can see some websites not liking their content being read outside of their page or an RSS feed…
April 6th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Any notices about blogs?
April 6th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
An idea for the “magnifying” lens:
“Right-Click”: when you right-click the mouse would become a magnifying lens
Two things I’d really like to see, but they didn’t make the list:
1. Drag-Scrolling: like, I can drag my mouse from right to left and flip pages; extremely similar to the scroll bar, but one that I could do while keeping the mouse over the pages.
2. Page rank. Ugh, this is near killer for me. When I search for New York (w/o selecting a category), I don’t want some small guide written in plain HTML. I want the big, popular sites.
Excellent job; I show it off to everyone I know! I’ve even changed the default search engine at my school to it.
April 8th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Thanks for the mention, John. Looks like SearchMe is becoming more feature-rich everyday. I think it has a very bright future. I noticed that Google has now moved the “Related Searches” text to the top of the SERPS. This UI tweak seems to have occurred in the last month or so. I have to wonder if the categories feature of SearchMe forced Google’s hand.
April 10th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
For the magnifying glass look at how Apple did it with Aperture.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Good effort. Great experience. I would echo #1. Image search would be niceness.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:11 pm
A Microsoft mouse model no. 1007 has a magnifying button on the side of it that is really a handy feature.
Not sure how you would script it but to me that a lens that would work like that would be the cat’s meow for a mag. solution.
When you press the button on the side of the mouse a mag window about 2″ by 4″ opens and you can just move it over any place on the page to enlarge the type or whatever.