searchme
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
SearchMe was a Mountain View, California visual search engine founded in March 2005 by Randy Adams and John Holland, with Sequoia Capital investing millions in its early years. It organized search results as snapshots of web pages — a coverflow-style interface like the iPhone's album selection — under the tagline "You'll know it when you see it." The site launched in beta in March 2008 and opened to the public that April, having indexed one billion pages. It raised about $45 million in total, including a $12.6 million round in May 2008 from Sequoia, DAG Ventures, Deepfork Capital and Lehman Brothers Venture Capital, and made its money from advertising displayed through screenshots.
02 / searchme FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
SearchMe could not close the financing needed to keep its search service online, and no immediate acquisition had materialized. The lack of replacement funding or a buyer threatened continued operations.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Randy Adams and John Holland found SearchMe in Mountain View; Sequoia Capital funds its early years.
- Public launch
SearchMe launches in beta in March and publicly that April with one billion pages indexed; a $12.6 million round follows in May.
- Offline and restructuring
Traffic collapses from 1.8 million visitors in March to 600,000 in May as the company cuts its $500,000-a-month advertising. On July 24, 2009, SearchMe goes offline after losing funding; it dismisses 35 of 45 employees and pivots toward broadband TV. That October, senior secured lender Lighthouse Capital Partners begins selling the company's IP — visual search UI, relevance algorithm and 23 patent applications — in parts.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / AFTERMATH
Lessons
SearchMe shows that a delightful interface cannot compensate for broken unit economics: a visual search engine that indexed a billion pages still needed roughly 3 million searches a day to break even, and when its $500,000-a-month advertising subsidy stopped, traffic collapsed within weeks. Competing head-on with Google on infrastructure costs, rather than on a defensible wedge, made the ending inevitable.