WebProNews

The Google company is best known its search engine at google.com. The corporation offers a number of other features, to be sure, but most of them are clearly branded - Google Video, Google Maps, etc. Yesterday it was discovered that the search engine SearchMash is also run by Google.

SearchMash's search results are very similar to those offered by the Google search engine. The difference lies in the presentation and the features. As Nathan Weinberg described it, SearchMash "includes some useful and out there' features that might not be right for Google.com, but could make a really interesting search engine."

"Of course," Weinberg continued, "if any of the features turn out to be huge hits, who knows?" He makes a very good point, although some of them don't have any hope of crossing over. One of these is the way in which the SearchMash "image results [are] shown next to regular results." This is "never gonna happen, [because] that's where the ads go on Google.com."

SearchMash also displays a "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'." Weinberg considered this "another great idea that would work well on regular Google," noting that "the code already exists there as part of the More' tab above the search box."

Google has yet to officially comment on SearchMash, but the privacy policy makes its role perfectly clear. "SearchMash is a website operated by Google Inc.," declares the very first sentence. Google may have been trying to keep that connection quiet so as not to affect any of its SearchMash experiments, but the cat is clearly out of the bag and running loose in the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan got an official response from Google, and posted it in this article. Thanks, Danny, for letting me know.

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.