Slashdot Mirror
Google's Test Search Engine
Bengt noted Google's SearchMash which is a testbed search engine. Google spokesbot says:
"The goal of Searchmash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users.
The experimental search engine looks very different from Google's Web sites and lacks Google branding. In this way, Google believes the site will yield more objective feedback from users."
It's the other things that are 'revolutionary'. 1. You can (or at least could at one point) rearrange the search results by dragging them up and down - Future application on influencing the ranking on sites. 2. Numbering of search results - not 'revolutionary' but useful i can tell you to search for nasa and see the 3rd result. 3. the options menu when you click on the green url. - I can imagine it will eventually include choices for mapping to address on site, site search (via coop) and so on. 4. start typing to search - fixes that issue with firefox where it tries to search and IE where sometimes goes up to the address bar and you end up searching using msn.com
Including Wikipedia makes sense. I now rely on Wikipedia way more than I rely on Google for my informational needs, because it isn't cluttered with pseudo-information that has no other purpose other than sell me something. To me, although perhaps not to Google, this is spam and it makes me not want to use Google. Of couse I can exclude pages involving "buy" or "customer service" from my results, but this is an inconvenience and I rarely bother to do so if (more often than not) I can find what I need on the wiki.
And when I want to use Wikipedia, I do not need to go via Google. Google would make themselves useful in a more unique way if they offered optional filtering of sales sites. Let me see pages on Catholic Saints that don't involve "special price" candles with pictures of them, give me information on my car without hundreds of businesses offering to replace it. And when I do want to spend money on the web (which is way less often than the times I look for information), I'll tell you Google, thank you very much.
blow your mind already
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...
barack to the future?
I often use space bar to page down in my web browser. I like the way, if you hit space bar while already at the bottom of the page, it adds another 10 results to the list, so you can continue hitting space bar to keep looking at more matches. It works for both web search and image search. I hate having to reach for the mouse to get to the next page of results (or using the mouse in general -- it's too slow, compared to keyboarding).
Maybe that's why it uses javascript, which others have been complaining about.
You know, at some point, you're going to have to take off the tinfoil and enable Javascript if you want to take advantage of all the shiny new tubes.
They are using it to do some nice stuff here, such as expanding a single page arbitrarily instead of generating the usual set of "" index buttons that obscures previous results when you navigate between pages. I like this UI a lot... no more trying to remember how many times I need to hit the Back button to return to a desired result.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834