The IP document they have on the site is quite interesting. Wonder why they call it confidential when it is lying out in open on the site.

SearchMe saddens me because the tech was really great. They messed up with a terrible UI (= trying to be so "different" from Google) and then (I believe) a lack of funds for marketing.

In their most recent online site, I always felt it was great tech terrible product. Sucks.

Lack of funding? They write in their document that total investment into the company was $45 Million

that isn't enough to build the technology and market it. I think the CEO said they needed ~$30M to build it, ~$30M to market it.

> 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). In this economy nobody wants to invest that kind of money in a company that is pre-revenue, even if the net result is potentially a multi-billion dollar company.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/searchme-may-go-offline...

With all due respect to these guys, 50M to market their product sounds unreal. They should publish their marketing plan and let let the public help them out.

And they definitely used some of it for marketing. They had billboards all around the SF area.

Not sure billboards is effective "marketing" these days especially for Web services.

Probably recruitment

Wow - that document serves as a really good example of the kind of information investors might be interested in.

If this means I won't have to deal with the indefatigable Charlotte bot ever again, I'll be a happy camper.

SearchMe results were too spammy. A flashy interface for a messy back end does not work it seems.