I think I’ve found the perfect search engine. Or pretty close anyway. It’s SearchMash.
If you look at the T&Cs it’s a product of Google Inc. If you do a search you get Google-like results. Apart from a couple of handy little differences.
- You get some handy extras (you can search images, blogs, videos and wikipedia from the same page without reloading).
- You can also jump to the next page of results without having to wait for the page to reload.
- There’s no ads! It took me a while to realise that the ads were missing, but then I realised that was how they made the space for all the other lovely extras.
Interesting to see how someone like Google is ‘sandboxing’ even this level of minor innovation. Keeping it a safe distance from the core business. I hope it doesn’t go changing. But I bet it will. Try it now in case it does.
This is a really interesting exploration on Google. They are tessting these different featured to get feedback that may be added to their main search productions.
The great thing is that they are experimenting, learning, trying different things.
That notion, to me, defines a lot of what the digital marketing space is like, or should be. Less and less are we creating huge mega projects, taking months of production and then let loose into the world and left alone.
Its possible now to put things out there and learn.
Requires more time & resources to be planned, but its important to making things more relevant.
Learn fast, act fast
Hi Iain,
We’ve also been working on a similar concept and here is a beta version launched by Yahoo! Australia:
http://au.alpha.yahoo.com/
My only criticism at this stage is if you are below the fold and open / cose a tab it jumps to the top of the page. Other than that, I think it’s a much cleaner UI.