SearchMe's categories have
their own neat little icons

SearchMe, a visual search engine that displays results as webpages (comparable to how iTunes users can scroll through their music libraries with album covers) has gone into private beta.

The company raised $31 million from Sequoia, DAG Ventures and Lehman Brothers. Sequoia previously invested in Mahalo, a human-powered search engine.

SearchMe comes stock with another search product, WikiSeek, which returns results from Wikipedia and sites linked to it.

The visual engine also indexes pages categorically to avoid confusion. For example, a search for "apple" can be searched in the "technology" section to avoid results about fruit.

SearchMe is not the first firm to try realizing the notion of an image-oriented search engine. In 2006, Like.com enabled consumers to search for products by appearance rather than text. When asked, representatives from Google have refused to comment on whether the search giant is working on image search features.