Visual search, such as the beta service at http://beta.searchme.com, has the potential to open up a new type of display advertising and move search away from copy-driven text ads.
Searchme’s slick, iTunes-esque presentation allows consumers to see snapshots of their search results and scroll through them to select the most appropriate.
The bandwidth-hungry site is not strictly a new idea. Exalead (www.exalead.com), Google and Yahoo! integrate images in search results, but the presentation on these is less interesting.
Similar to the searchme.com beta is the 3D search service of Spacetime (spacetime.com).Again, this allows users to enter a search term and see the top results as web pages.They can flick between the results in a three-dimensional environment.