If you try to visit www.searchme.com today, don’t bother: you’ll be redirected to Google instead. Apparently, the positive media coverage (including one of my articles on SitePoint) did not help the Sequoia Capital funded startup to get a new round of financing.

CEO Randy Adams wrote a letter to Michael Arrington, where he explains the reasons for taking the site down:

We knew when we started the company that to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo,it was going to take at least $100 million, half to build the back end across thousands of servers and half to get distribution (maybe more with Microsoft spending $100 million on Bing advertising alone). What we didn’t plan on was the terrible downturn in the economy which made it impossible to raise another $50 million to get distribution (mainly through toolbar deals).

CEO Adams is obviously very naïve if he thinks that $100 million is enough to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google. I was pretty enthusiastic about searchme.com myself, but attempting to compete with the search giants with a “visual search engine” is unrealistic: while pretty to look at, a visual search engine, as refined as it may be, will probably never become too popular online, because the users need information more than they need pretty pictures.

Searchme.com raised around $44 million in venture capital, a stunning number for a startup that allegedly copied http://search.spacetime.com/ . If Searchme.com ever manages to get another round of funding, I hope they will rethink their strategy and, instead of trying to compete with Google, they will actually try to attract a more plausible audience: the iPhone users.


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