SearchMash: Google`s New Experimental Playground - More Features
(Page 3 of 4 )
The image results panel is a nice touch. It shows the top three images for your search next to the web results, on the right hand side. I don't think of search engine optimization as particularly photogenic, but here is the panel SearchMash gave me when I did a search for SEO:
As you can see, it tells you how many images turn up for your search term, and gives you the option of clicking to see more images. When you click on the image, it takes you to the web site on which the image appears, which might or might not be related to the image - or useful to your search. The cartoon in the center adorned a story about a strategic partnership to provide a suite of press release SEO tools (which is at least vaguely related). The intriguing flow chart on the bottom led to a site in Japanese - fortunately for this poor American, the site offered an English translation.
The more images link takes you, naturally enough, to a page with more images. With more than 200,000 hits for matching images, you would expect to see links to numbered pages at the bottom. Instead, you get a page that barely scrolls vertically and another link at the bottom that says the same thing, more images. What gives?
That can best be answered by explaining another feature of SearchMash: the more results bar, which is also used here. At the bottom of your search results, SearchMash gives you a link that says "more web pages." Click on that link, and the page automatically scrolls upward, giving you another 10 web results. The same thing happens with the more images link: click it, and the page scrolls up, giving you about another screen's worth of images from which to choose. This feature is very similar to the "continuous scroll" once used by Windows Live and discontinued for web site results (though Amazon added it to A9 after a recent revamp that threw out many of its features).
Finally, I'd like to touch on a feature SearchMash says is "just for fun right now, but we have some ideas for how to use this." It's called reorder results. You can click the number next to a search result and drag it around to change the order. The number stays the same though. You can see that in this screen shot of a reordering I did for a search on juggling equipment.
You're probably wondering why I did juggling equipment instead of SEO. Actually, I did do an SEO reordering the day before I did this one. SEO Chat came up in the number three position, so just for fun I moved it to the number one spot. When I came back to finish this article the next day, SEO Chat came up in the number one position rather than the number three spot. (It looks like we're the second organic result on Google for SEO at the time of this writing, so that doesn't necessarily prove anything).
Next: Worth Noting >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
