Visual search is a new concept aimed at making the overall search experience more user-friendly, interactive and quicker for the end-user. While there are visual search engines on the traditional Web, the concept has been better received on the mobile Web- where quicker and more visual search results are more welcomed given the nature of the devices used.
To heed this trend, Searchme has been busy introducing mobile applications that bring mobile visual search to the various mobile platforms. While an iPhone, Android and even Nokia Ovi Store version already exist, the Windows Mobile platform has lacked an app. That’s now changed with Searchme’s debut of a beta version of its mobile app for Windows Mobile users.
Instead of a list of blue links, Searchme delivers images of web pages, videos, music and products that play right on the search result page making it easy to find and consume information on a cell phone. Searchme offers significantly improved performance for searching on a phone because it runs as a native Windows Mobile application, rather than in a slow-rendering web browser. Unlike other search applications, Searchme supports a full touch screen interface.
In the beginning, I have to say I wasn’t impressed with the idea of visual search. It’s a slower process and I found it harder to find exactly what I was looking for given the plethora of media that’s presented with each search. Text-based search results just feels more natural. With the advent of bringing visual search into a separate mobile application, the idea seems much more viable.
