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One of the best things about being a research nut is that I come across the very best, and the very worst, of the Internet. No matter how crappy the day is going, I’m all but guaranteed to come across some sites that really peek my interest.

The other day I noticed a comment left on an Immediate Edge post about a cool search engine site, currently in beta, called Searchme. Basically the site is just what the title says, a visual search engine. You can start typing a keyword and as you do the site begins to show you categories that are related to your query. When you choose a category you then see pictures of web pages that the site thinks are related to your search.

This is really cool site! The Searchme visual search engine leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex. The results pages are displayed in a carousel view that you can thumb through. Whats so nice about this is that you can see the page before you go to it. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I click a search result on Google or Yahoo and I end up at a site made for Adsense. Frustrating.

Just for fun, I plugged in the search term “lensroll” and I was quickly presented with a picture of the blog here as well as pictures of all the sites that the search engine thinks are related to the term. It seems the search is pretty much right on as most of the pages I viewed have posts that link to Lensroll. If you want to view textual information on the site you can do so by clicking the “little” gray arrow in the center of the page just below the scroll bar and you are then presented with text version of the link.

Although the sites been around awhile (2005 I think) it’s worth sharing. Searchme is an innovative rich Internet application that is helping fundamentally change the Internet search experience. I’m a huge fan of sites push the envelope of whats normal and the site does exactly that. Love it!

Have fun.

Many of you who frequent our site may know that my partner Glen, aka N376, continued his endeavor of providing quality back links to user generated content pages by creating a site called Squoogle.

For those of you who have never heard of Squoogle.com, it’s an article directory site for publishers who place their content on sites such as HubPages, Squidoo, Gather and Associated Content.

Launched in beta in January of 2008 the site has grown quickly in popularity amongst the community and now boast around 400 users and 1500 links. The site is run with a software called INDEXU from Nicecoder and has a very basic concept in that it gives content publishers the ability to continue to build a network (back links) to their web 2.0 content properties while also throwing in a social networking aspect by allowing other users to rate and review your pages.

Here are a few stats I was able to dig up on the site:

Home Page PR - 3
Links: 1924 <– Marketleap.com data
Alexa - 339644
Pages in Google - 500 non omitted

I’m seeing user submitted content from the site and have read posts from others that their content is showing up in search results within the top 30 results. For the short period of time the site has been up things are looking pretty good!

As I’ve mentioned a few times: I think back links from quality sites is the number one way to get your content to stand out from the crowd and direct more visitors to your sites. Squoogle is a perfect vehicle in helping to achieve this. If you publish content, take a few minutes and head over and have a look around. Oh, and if you have your own content that needs a little link juice make sure to add it to the site.

To your success.