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Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme just plunked down $31 million on a company he also chairs, called Searchme. It's an image-based search engine. Search is a crowded field but Searchme CEO Randy Adams thinks there's room for innovation. "Search," he told BoomTown, "is still largely a text and list experience." True, but Snap CEO Tom McGovern told me almost the exact same thing in May 2006. Didn't work out for him. Now Snap is a site for bloggers. Below, a video demonstration of Searchme's "innovation" and another video showing two-year-old Snap doing pretty much the same things.

Searchme may remind some of Apple's iTunes Cover Flow feature, but if it's more likely to succeed than Snap that's not why. Snap was search-ad innovator Bill Gross's brainchild. Good genes. But Searchme's Sequioa roots are better. Sequioa funded Google, which is known to return the favor from time to time.