I’ve posted previously about the Search Me search engine. It’s an excellent search engine that shows snapshots of the webpages in addition to text information, which makes it very accessible to English Language Learners.

Today they unveiled a number of new abilities, and it seems like every tech blog is agog about them. The primary addition is that you can now create “stacks” of categorized sites, images, and videos; embed them in a blog or website; and/or email them to a friend or teacher. You’re also supposed to be able write some kind of description, or tag, for each site.

As readers of this blog now, I’m always interested in web applications that enhance higher-order thinking skills like categorization. Search Me would be an extraordinary application for all students (and I hope will be after they work the bugs out) if the tagging function worked well. However, every time I tried writing a description of an individual website within one of my “stacks” the tag was visible, but the website/image/video was not. It kept on saying that “We Are Creating This Image: It Should Be Ready Soon.” But it never was “ready.”  I’ve emailed them about the problem, and will share their response with readers.

Of course, the site is still in “beta,” so it can’t be expected to work perfectly. Once it is, though, it will definitely end-up on one of my “The Best…” lists.

You might also want to check out Middlespot, a similar site that doesn’t look as pretty, and doesn’t yet search for photos (though they say that’s coming soon), but does have a tagging and categorization process that works well.