SearchMash: Google`s New Experimental Playground - Worth Noting
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SearchMash is Google's testing ground for search engine technology. As such, it's unlikely that we'll ever see any ads on this site, unless there's something about ad technology that Google wants to test - and even then, if I were Google, I might use a different site. (Google is certainly able to do that; the company has bought up a ton of variations on the SearchMash URL).
A number of observers have commented that the reordering search results feature might be a way for Google to let users "tweak" the results so that they are more personally relevant. It could also be a way for users to "vote" on the relevance of particular results and thus influence a web site's actual standing in the SERPs. If that is the case, I'm sure I don't need to mention how open this could be to abuse. It's not a feature implemented in Google itself, of course, and I imagine the search engine would think long and hard before adding it.
Danny Sullivan has pointed out that, with SearchMash being covered in blogs and the SEO-centric press, it is attracting exactly the kind of test audience that Google doesn't want: "people who are the influencers or tech-heads or early adopters that Google's not trying to test against." Google apparently has ways to filter out that kind of traffic and drive the other kind of traffic to SearchMash for particular test purposes. At the very least, Google can put SearchMash in front of focus groups for unbiased opinions of features without even letting them know the true source of the technology.
Speaking of technology, it shouldn't surprise anyone that many of SearchMash's features seem to be powered by AJAX, since Google has already shown signs of heading in that direction. To mention another insight from Danny Sullivan, SearchMash feels somewhat similar to Amazon's A9 - which is interesting in light of A9's CEO Udi Manber defecting to Google.
What does this mean for SEOs? If you want to see what Google is working on, you can go to SearchMash. But my guess is that these are longer-term projects - some engineer's "20 percent time," as Lee Odden of Searchnewz speculated. I'm quite prepared to eat my words if I'm wrong, but I don't think we'll see any features migrating from SearchMash to Google for at least six months to a year (and probably longer). Still, watching Google's playground to see what it is up to ought to be fun. I wonder how long it will be before SearchMash includes a form for users to comment on what features they'd like to see next.
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