Searchme launches private beta with help from Adobe

Searchme is a new visually-oriented search engine which gives its results in the form of a viewable "stack" of page snapshots. The graphical flow of those snapshots may give Web developers a clue as to what's possible with Flex.

Anyone who's used iTunes will immediately see the similarity between Searchme's results page and iTunes' "Cover Flow" view. The two are practically identical. However, the search engine isn't merely aping an existing method of categorization, but is showing off what can be done in Adobe's new Flex 3 open source framework. The free SDK was released at the end of February with Adobe's AIR runtime and SDK.

Searchme was built hand-in-hand with Adobe Consulting, and was recently reported to have gotten a $25 million investment from Sequoia Capital and other unnamed groups. Sequoia Capital is one of the tech industry's longest-running investment groups, who have contributed funds to such success stories as: Apple, Google, Yahoo, nVidia, PayPal, and EA.

In the visual search field, Searchme will be competing with already-launched search service RedZee 2.0, a revision of a search engine which has existed since 2002.