Sneaky look at the future of Google
Posted 12 April 2007 at 9:34AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online
You probably haven't heard of Searchmash.com - and if you only have a quick peek, you'd be forgiven for wondering why I'm mentioning it. But check the terms and conditions: 'SearchMash is a website operated by Google Inc.' Suddenly it's worth taking notice, eh?
Searchmash is basically Google's experimental area. They warn that 'it is constantly evolving as we come up with ideas and figure out what works and what doesn't... Please bear with us when the site is unavailable as we are limiting its use.' So what does the future of search hold, then?
Well, if you thought Google's current interface was 'stripped back', wait til you see Searchmash. You don't even get a 'submit' button: just type your search query, and press 'enter'. Which makes a lot of sense, really.
The results themselves are pretty close to a normal Google search, but you're likely to see some unexpected entries, and a slightly different order. If you're a hardcore search engine optimiser, it might be wise to watch Searchmash, in case ranking changes find their way over to Google proper.
In the right hand margin, you'll see a few dropdown boxes, for 'images', 'blogs', 'videos' and 'Wikipedia'; a single click brings up the top few results for each filtered category, without taking you away from the main page, which is nice. I particularly like the ability to play YouTube videos within the page margin.
But perhaps the neatest trick is the 'infinite scrolling': there's no need to go to the next page of results, when the 'next batch' is called in automatically as you near the bottom of the page.
Tags: beta, google, search engine optimisation, searchmash, youtube
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