Snap: Is This Really a Better Way to Search?
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While the major search engines dominate the field, upsets are still possible. Snap is a fairly new search engine with a very familiar face at the helm. Does that mean it's worth watching? Keep reading to find out.
Is this really a better way to Search?
IdeaLab's Bill Gross, who started Overture and sold it to Yahoo for $1.63 billion, seems set to continue a long line of profitable start-ups with http://www.snap.com/, one of the top five alternative search engines. Though Google, Yahoo, and MSN combined hold over 90 percent of the search engine market, Snap has already been the subject of some rave reviews. Indeed, despite being just two years young, it was included in Time magazine's August 14 edition as one of the fifty coolest web sites for 2006. Are the reviews justified or are they as a result of the founder's pedigree and the big bucks that venture capitalists have poured into the company?
I decided to find out. I wrote down my list of search terms for the day, which included "mechatronics," "cytometry," "Daniel Craig" and "lyrics for buttons by PCD," opened up several search engines and compared their results to Snap. I also dragged along several willing accomplices (including one who only uses www.ask.com and knows nothing about other search engines apart from Google).
After two days and some perplexing results (where are the paid listings?) I started writing this review. I will look at how good Snap is at returning relevant search results for some terms, as well as its "cool" factor, where it stands in relation to the Big Three plus Ask, and whether it is a good place to advertise products. I will also provide some tips on submitting your site to Snap and getting listed in its SERPs.
Relevance
When reading up on how Snap generated their SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages), I saw CEO and co-founder Tim McGovern wax eloquent on the importance of their licensed ISP data fields. These fields factor into users' behavioral data; Snap uses them to sort results in the SERPs, so it actually lists the most "useful" pages first according to the user's behavior. Thus you are more likely to see the information you are seeking in the first few results, and surfing the page presented will actually lead you to crawling deeper into a web site, instead of flipping between the search engine listings and the web pages.
When surfing on "offshore web design" I discovered that Snap returned more pages from the same website than most search engines did. While Google would probably give me two results from the same web site, Snap could in some cases return as many as five. The listings were not more links to the same pages, even if they were from the same web site (this is not guaranteed; the SERPs are different). It's worth noting that Snap also returned less listings on most search queries, and for my "lyrics for buttons by PCD," Snap couldn't find any listings, nor did it offer alternatives, as Google is wont to do if I mistype one of my arcane queries.
The algorithms Snap uses are designed by their team of developers to rank "most used" pages, actually adjusting the SERPs to reflect users' behavior. This causes the algorithms to reflect some form of human intelligence (what the herd does) instead of just allowing the "snapbot" crawler to collate the data and rank pages based on key word counts or links. Indeed, on some of the top pages which were displayed, the keyword occurred only once, and the only links which linked to it were inbound links! Your most highly optimized page may not appear in Snap's SERPs first, but what the users regard as your most useful page will.
In Snap's listings we actually have unique results which will be more relevant to the searcher (and to advertisers). It turns all the talk about "behavioral marketing" into reality, but believe me, the view takes some getting used to.
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