Google is making efforts to improve and evolve its search. One of the best ways is to open the new features and get feedback from the users, which is what SearchMash (via Google Blogoscoped) does. I have not found any apparent difference in the search results, but there are changes in the interface. You can give your feedback whether it works as it says.
The two features I liked were that the search returned all types of results - text and images both. Maybe this can extend to other types as well like multimedia. There is a box for searches in Wikipedia. Second one is the elimination of next page or pagination of search results. You can see more results for the search. Simple and quick, I think this will make it easier to go beyond the first 10 results. They can as well go for the pageless design.
The layout has more of a portlets approach. The different result sets, if you will, are physically separated. This can help the user to focus better. There are no sponsored results, but that is probably because this is purely experimental and for testing. There are other features like typing without focusing in the search box or no search button.
I have no idea if any more features would make the interface more usable. But I am dead sure that it will help if they make their algorithms more transparent. I am not sure if they are also testing new algorithms to improve search here. But this looks like an effort determined for improvements which is laudable. One more thing you will notice - no Google branding or Google products to distract you. Whether incidental or accidental, this will definitely help.
November 15th, 2006 at 11:21 am
[...] Abhijit Nadgouda of Ifacethoughts.net had a very good article about Searchmash.com. He did his research and did a very good job describing the different features of the new Web 2.0 search engine interface. [...]