Shh, SearchMash is Really Google's By: Jason Hahn - Topic: Search - Date: October 3, 2006

Recently, a relatively unknown search engine was discovered to be Google property.  Why hasn't Google been showing this property anywhere on its sites, or announcing its existence?  Because they don't really want you to know that it's their's...just yet.

SearchMash is the search engine's name, and if you click on the "Privacy Policy" the first line makes it very clear:  "SearchMash is a website operated by Google Inc."

So, why does it seem so hush-hush?

Danny Sullivan asked Google, and he got this answer:  "In this case, one of the important factors we wanted to address was the influence that may come from Google branding. Creating a separate site will help us gather more objective data about user response to new interfaces."

The search engine looks very barebones, much like Google does, but don't be fooled into thinking that it's just a plain vanilla search engine.  It has some slightly unique features, including a URL menu that gives users some options concerning their search results (i.e. Open in this window, Open in a new window, Open cached copy, More from this site, More similar pages), an Image results panel, which displays the top three image results for whatever words are being used in the query, a More results bar, which shows ten more results each time the bar is clicked or the space bar is pressed (this feature does not seem to work in Firefox), and maybe the most interesting feature, the ability to Reorder results.

This last one allows searchers to drag and drop search results to customize the order to any way they want it.  "This is just for fun right now, but we have some ideas for how to use this," the site says.  Keep your eyes peeled for more about this feature, which clearly has the most significant implications out of all the features SearchMash currently has.

"The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users," a spokeswoman for Google said.

Not all of these features will make it to the big time on Google.com, but it's not hard to imagine how some of them could make for nice enhancements.

Till then, SearchMash should make for an interesting alternative search engine.

Further reading can be found here and here.