Google's SearchMash

One of the things I hate about covering the latest news is that sometimes you run across something but you don't know if it's new, or old and you just missed any discussion of it. The problem is that if you talk about something that's old news then you're not posting anything really relevant to your readers and they wonder, "Where have you been?"

At the risk of posting something "old", Robert emailed me yesterday and asked if I had heard of SearchMash. I hadn't. Though I do remember running across a post about Google registering a bunch of mashup search domains. After performing some searches I don't see a whole lot mentioned about this other than at the v7n blog. Both of those posts were from earlier this month so maybe it's not old news just yet!

SearchMash is owned by Google, but you really wouldn't know that by looking at it unless you click into the privacy policy or view the domain registration. So what does SearchMash do? Its a simple combined integration of standard and image search. You get your regular listings on the left and instead of ads (What? No Google ads?) on the left you get a few image results. Kinda neat.

SearchMash offers a features page that tells you about all the cool things this interface provides and lets you tell them if its helpful or not. Here's the rundown:

Start Typing

Lets you start typing your search without first clicking in the search box. I'm an avid user of the FireFox search feature which allows me to find stuff on pages by simply typing something (when not in a form box). I use this frequently when checking client rankings so I don't have to look through results, I just do a quick search on each page. The Start Typing feature prevents this from happening.

URL Menu

Click the URL and you get a small menu of options, open in new window, open cached page, etc.

Reorder Results

This feature lets you drag and drop search results into any order you want. They say its just for fun now but they have future plans for this. This could be handy for visitor interaction with search results and improving relevance of search results, but also a potential for serious abuse and manipulation to occur.

More Results Bar

When you click on "more web pages" at the bottom then more results appear below the original ten result. Keep clicking and you get to keep all 20 results on the page plus ten new results, and so on.

SearchMash is a fun, ad-free search environment. I could see many of these features making their way into Google search at some point in the future.