As has been well publicized, Searchme shut off the lights last week. It’s sad for all of us who worked so hard over the past few years to build the engine. We came from nothing and made tremendous progress for such a small team. I’m really proud of everyone who built not only a functioning search engine, but a quality one that was constantly getting better. Our relevance was on the rise, we were increasing our coverage, we were adding new sources of multimedia content, we continued to refine and improve our classifiers, our advertising programs were growing, we’d made improvements to the UI, etc.
I’d like to give a special thanks to my team – The Search Quality Department – who did so many amazing and groundbreaking things, ranging from working day in and day out to look for ways to improve our search engine, to building the ontology and classifiers to classify billions of documents, to generating a ton of training and evaluation judgments for the ranking functions, to identifying spam and keeping one of the cleanest search engine indexes, to reviewing ads, and so many other things.
And thank you to all of you users who used Searchme and provided us with positive feedback and suggestions.