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Since Google tests and refines it's search using http://www.searchmash.com/, maybe they should be trying to out-do Google's future instead of trying to keep up with it's present?

Im quite fond of the way they use adresses. A search for the word "bassoon" simply gets the adress http://www.searchmash.com/search/bassoon. I usually hate the adress of previous searches, because they don't fit in the location-bar. When you click the bar and type www.google.com you get a whole bunch of adresses that you have no idea where they lead.

I definitely prefer
http://www.searchmash.com/search/bassoon
before
http://www.google.se/search?hs=L0w&hl=sv&client=fi refox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Asv-SE%3Aofficial&q=basso on&btnG=S%C3%B6k&meta=

Sorry for the bad english. I'm from sweden. Bork Bork

Im quite fond of the way they use adresses. A search for the word "bassoon" simply gets the adress http://www.searchmash.com/search/bassoon. I usually hate the adress of previous searches, because they don't fit in the location-bar. When you click the bar and type www.google.com you get a whole bunch of adresses that you have no idea where they lead.

I definitely prefer
http://www.searchmash.com/search/bassoon
before
http://www.google.se/search?hs=L0w&hl=sv&client=fi refox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Asv-SE%3Aofficial&q=basso on&btnG=S%C3%B6k&meta=

Sorry for the bad english. I'm from sweden. Bork Bork

That's because the more easy-to-use "http://www.searchmash.com/search/foo" works instead. I just changed keyword.URL in Firefox's about:config to http://www.searchmash.com/search/

Now, I can just type the search in the address bar, no prefixes, and it works great.

http://www.searchmash.com/search/google

Web Pages - about 1,780,000,000
Images - about 1,140,000
Wikipedia - about 1,130,000

1.7 billion. that's an interesting statistic.....

Trying to search using an HTML GET query (for instance by using the address http://www.searchmash.com/?query=foo) doesn't do anything.

This means I can't add it as a keyword search in Firefox. :-(

So maybe I should search for "I seldom search for images and don't want my results page cluttered with images just because someone on slashdot thinks it would be cool" to restore the feedback balance?

I can't see any feedback form, but as someone mentioned, they review what people search for, so you could just search for "images box is too far down".

When searching for myself, Google and Searchmash both show the same images; Searchmash simply moves them to the bottom of the screen where I can't see them.

Images: yes / no / dumb location?

Does Google *really* need user feedback to know this is a dumb layout? Why not move the pics to the empty area in the right margin? Oh, that's right- that's where the ads will go...

Google may be loosing ground in quality. There results are often redundant, wiki.com, about.com, 404 sites, you get a bunch of canned results regardless of your search (or maybe I just search for things only on about and wiki). They have a few concepts they are working on; their coop is going bumping up their results (especially with health topics) they have rumors of launching mashups which would clean their results. They seem to be looking at other ways to provide the same data. I can search for a health topic or I can coop a health topic. I would assume they will start a few other sites (they have http://www.searchmash.com/ going) but I expect to see others come up with a variety of uses. The big upcoming challenge for search engines is to provide a smart list of sites, searches that produce safe sites to go to (no spy ware) sites with accurate information (not blogs and other junk which is all lies), I expect in the next few years the consumers will begin to demand this from the search engines once they get tired of the crap their computers catch on the net, they will want some filtering from the search companies.