Today another search application for the iPhone is under review.  This one is called Searchme and has a sexy coverflow type interface where you can flip through the search results just like in iTunes. 

When you open the app, it is quite straight forward and you are greeted with a search bar at the top at the top of the screen.  Lets do some searching.  We searched for London hotel.  The coverflow interface loaded up and some results started to appear.  You can see a miniture version of the web page of the search results in front of you and you can drag it off the screen to the left to see the next web page screen shot come in on the right.  Cool.  The search results were relevant and about my search topic.

Along the top there are several buttons such as Travel, Restaurants, Theatre and Product reviews.  You can click on these to get info on those subjects.  I originally thought that the app was only searching those subjects until I tried another search. 

Opensocial.  This time a pop up came and asked me "did you mean open social" (with a space).  I said no and carried on.   The first results were some Opensocial articles and blog posts from news.com, techcrunch, cnet, linux.com etc.   I was actually looking for the Opensocial pages on google but I guess can't complain, maybe I should refine my search.  I guess we all get used to the results when googling. 

To my surprise, along the top were new categories that were relevant to my search.  Web development, software, blogs etc.  It knows the area that I am searching which is great. 

To view the web page, you can either double click for that page to open up in a safari window or you can do pinching gestures to zoom in right in the app and look at the web page in detail.  You can also turn the phone and change from portrait to landscape viewing mode at anytime. 

Another nice feature is that in portrait mode, under the thumbnail of the website picture is a three line description of the site.

The next search was

Ducati monster.  (a motorcycle for those not into motorcycles).  The first result was an enthusiast forum site which was followed with 12 or so sites that had something to do with this particular motorbike.  The problem is that I was looking for info at ducati.com on this bike and ducati.com was not until about the 14th result and even then it was ducati.com/uk.   Anyway, not too bad, all the results were relevant (and the categories along the top as well).

One quirk about flipping through the results.  If you "flip" each picture too hard, more than one will pass.  I would rather have the next one snap into place so as not to pass several results by accident. 

Overall, it is functional.  It isn't really that helpful with having the thumbnails though, they are really too small to see any text on them.  The "pinch to zoom" function is good if you only want to look but you can not interact with the page once zoomed in.  You will have to launch the site in safari to do that.   One thing that the visual view does give you is you can tell right away if it is a site you recognize or if it is a really crap website. 

Speed.  Here is the downfall and I don't really think it is Searchme's fault.  I was testing on a 2G iPhone over the EDGE network.  It was too slow for daily use for sure.  In a pinch MAYBE I would use it sometimes.  But then again maybe not, google might be faster, more familiar and easier to just read the text results. 

I will keep it on the iPhone for now, but probably it needs 3G to speed things up and make it more enjoyable.  If anyone tries it on 3G, let us know your experience in the comments.

Searchme application for the iPhone is available HERE