Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
SearchMash: Googles playpen
<>p>Google has a play pen at SearchMash, although you have to look at the privacy policy to find out (or WHOIS).Nathan Weinberg has written up a nice piece on Google running SearchMash, which covers the nice rich features:
Type in the search box without actually clicking in it. The idea? There isn’t exactly anywhere else to type, so any typing should just go there. Sounds like a good idea. This one could work on Google.com, if it doesn’t affect page loads too much. Doesn’t work in Opera, and only on search results pages.
Menu of options by each result, letting you click to get “Open in this windows”, “Open in new windows”, “Open cached copy”, “More from this site”, “More similar pages”. Another great idea that would work well on regular Google, and the code already exists there as part of the “More” tab above the search box.
Image results shown next to regular results. Never gonna happen, that’s where the ads go on Google.com.
Reorder results just by grabbing and dragging the number next to them. Cool idea. Currently does little, but could become part of Google Personalized Search, which already lets you remove results, so reordering is the next step.
Clicking for more results loads them in the current page and scrolls it down. A much more natural form of an idea Live.com had (and eventually junked), and a great implementation. I was able to load 90 results in a single page.
There are also other touches such as the ‘Showing 1 – 20′ item on the top right. If you scroll or change the browser size, that will dynamically change to tell you what is visible.
I thought it was funny that under ‘images’ was a Yahoo! Search page linked to as ‘ajaxian.com’. It would be nice if they also tied into blog search and google news all in one.
Related Content:
Nice! They can use the reorder-function to improve search-results. Why should I use Google.com any more?
Google: Gadgets, SearchMash
Google made a few new announcements today. Fairly stunning is that the Google Gadgets used for people’s customized Google home pages, are now available for people to embed in any web page. This is pretty cool, as the widgets include RSS feed read…
This totally interferes with Firefox’ find as you type and is frankly quite annoying.
Nice, but for a playground I prefer Slurpo.com.
What is with Google’s inability to make anything work propoerly in Opera? Google is slowly losing me. I am an Opera supporter and it is not that hard to make things work right.