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SearchMe is a new visual search engine which lets you see the websites in the search results before you visit them. Watch the demonstration video here:

The flipping feature looks pretty cool, but what makes it so useful and what does it mean for website owners? If would say the visual search approach might result in better conversion rates, because people see the sites in the search results and can then directly go to the website they think they’ll like best without having to click through all the other sites. This means traffic could become more targeted. Of course, it depends on how well SearchMe’s search algorithm will be working, but the potential to make finding websites easier is defnitely there. On the other hand, it is possible that poorly designed websites will receive less traffic than other sites just because they don’t look as attractive. Another negative aspect is adult content. From SearchMe’s FAQ:

We make every effort to allow people to filter out adult material from their results. We’ve done our best, and we’d like to think that we’re working at the same level as other major search engines. It’s impossible to be perfect with today’s Internet, but we’ll continue to improve on this as time goes on.

But what I really like about SearchMe is that it automatically categorizes the websites in its index. It then recognizes keywords and suggests related categories, so that you can exclude unrelated websites from the search results.

SearchMe got $31 million in funding from Sequoia , the guys who also backed Google and Yahoo. It isn’t based on any of these search engines as SearchMe built its own engine and has its own index which currently includes about 1 billion websites. The private beta has recently been launched, you can sign up for it here.