with pictures:

(
searchme.com
theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills/
www.wetellstories.co.uk
twitter.com/DowningStreet
lifegoesonintehran.com
www.nabble.com
downforeveryoneorjustme.com
)

THE INTERNET COLUMN
By Giles Turnbull

It's not easy to set up a brand new search engine these days, given Google's overwhelming dominance over everything search-related on the web. 

That's not stopped the team behind Searchme (www.searchme.com) from having a go. Their new search site could be described as the anti-Google, because it displays its results in a completely different way.

Where Google shows you a page of plain text links, Searchme offers visual results in the form of little screenshots of each page it finds that matches your search.

And the screenshots aren't just shown in a plain old grid of images, either. They're displayed like a horizontal stack which you can flip through - just like you can flip through albums on an iPod Touch or in Apple's iTunes software.

Of course, this requires a little more web engineering. Searchme is built entirely in Flash, the web technology behind a lot of multimedia (it's what YouTube uses to display videos). That's not a bad thing in itself, but the first thing you'll notice is that Searchme can't quite match the speed of Google - or any other text-based search engine.

Perhaps it doesn't want to, though. The Searchme mantra is "See what you're searching for", and it is designed this way for a reason. The people behind it don't want to make searching faster, just easier on the eyes. 

So much so that Searchme comes in two flavours - "Day" and "Night", depending on how bright you like your web pages to look.

In use, Searchme seems to do a perfectly good job of displaying results, but it didn't seem to offer much else beyond the visual pizzazz. There's one other new idea: as you type, Searchme comes up with categories of search results that it thinks might be appropriate. As you type "Gordon Brown," it suggests "Politics", "European Union" and "Political news". 

It looks nice, but it's not a terribly new idea. Other sites have been doing similar things for a while now, but Google still has the upper hand simply because it's fast and it usually finds what people are looking for. That button wasn't labeled "I'm feeling lucky" for nothing.

Because of the pizzazz, finding specific pages among the search results was a lot slower. Any text-based rival shows a list of 10 or 20 results in an instant; using Searchme, it might take you one, two or even more minutes to flick through them all. 

Eye-candy might be nice to look at, but not many people have got the time or the patience to deal with that every time they need to track down a fact on the web. 

If you want to try Searchme for yourself, you might need to wait a bit. The service is currently still in beta, which is technical speak for testing mode. A handful of invites to join the beta are available - you can apply for one at the Searchme home page. 


+ MySociety needs your help +

Thanks to MySociety, anyone can read what's been going on in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com. MySociety's started a new campaign to get Parliamentary Bills published in a way that they can be easily re-published on the internet - something that the civil servants in charge haven't got round to doing themselves. If you'd like to add your support to the campaign, read all about it at theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills/


+ They're telling stories +

Penguin Books has started an experiment in online fiction and games playing at www.wetellstories.co.uk. Over six weeks, they're publishing six interactive short stories with connections to the real world. In the stories you'll find phone numbers you can call, web sites you can visit; they're examples of the ARG genre (Alternate Reality Game). The stories are written by famous novelists and posted on the web by British ARG experts Six to Start (www.sixtostart.com).


+ Browsing around +

:: Gordon Brown now has a Twitter account
twitter.com/DowningStreet

:: Life goes on in Tehran - a fascinating photoblog
lifegoesonintehran.com

:: Get yourself a free web forum
www.nabble.com

:: Is (some web site) down for everyone, or just me?
downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org

ENDS