SearchMash: Google Reborn

Overhauled User Interface

Google’s look has become synonymous with its results. Giving someone Google’s results without the famous rainbow-colored logo and the plain, white background is like giving a kid brown Orange Juice. Sure, the results are the same, but psychologically, we’re not as comfortable with brown orange juice¹ It’s the same with SearchMash. Until we got used to it (and had incentive to use it over Google – read the rest of the review for more on that though), SearchMash was just simply unnatural. That doesn’t mean ugly; just radically and unnaturally different.

Where the majority of search engines out there are busy playing catch-up-to-Google as far as search results go; it seems that the tables are flipped when it comes to the interface. In short, for SearchMash Google has taken interface ideas from everywhere on the web but Google itself. You can’t really blame them for wanting to change the Google results page though, can you?

Infinite (Page-Less) Scrolling

This was Microsoft’s brainchild with the Live Search prototypes. Basically the idea is to do away with pages. On Microsoft’s Live Search, the more you scroll down, the more results that appear. Just like Excel: keep hitting the down button and new rows just keep on coming! SearchMash incorporates pretty much the same idea, but with a minor difference. Instead of detecting when the browser reaches the “bottom”² of the browser page and then dynamically displaying more data, SearchMash provides a “more” link which adds on the next 20 results to the page.

Who’s right, what’s better? It all depends. Live Search’s method is certainly flashier and much more natural, but it relies on some advanced AJAX scroll-detection techniques that break in several browsers (basically anything except the latest versions of Opera, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and Firefox). By contrast, SearchMash’s method is much more robust and simple, albeit a bit less intuitive and so much less natural to use.

The Purple Effect

We’re not sure why Google picked purple as their theme of choice for SearchMash, but whether it has something to do with the “royal” connotations or something else, the effect is the same. It seems that the current design is more about concepts than aesthetic appeal, because between the squished-up logo and the pale-ish purple hues, it’s certainly far from being the color of choice for the next-gen web interface to the greatest search engine on the web.

Useful Content on the Side

Several times we’ve brought up the topic of Wikipedia in Google search results. Basically, if you search for any noun or term, Wikipedia is one of the top ten results. We suggested a link on the side to the Wikipedia page on the content and then removing it from the results, but SearchMash takes that a bit further. Again, this is something else that can be considered “borrowed ideas” from Microsoft’s own Live.com user interface, which for some time did the same.

1. As a matter of fact, this has been psychologically proven. Not “chocolate brown” orange juice mind you, but “mud-brown” OJ. Little kids do this for the science fair, and it has something to do with how appeal affects taste. Google it! ↩

2. Seeing as the page is theoretically infinitely long, we are at a loss of what to call the “virtual bottom” of the HTML container ↩