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.
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! ↩
Seeing as the page is theoretically infinitely long, we are at a loss of what to call the “virtual bottom” of the HTML container ↩
I just looked at SearchMash.com after seeing a link to this story on Digg, you’re right, it does look like someone barfed the design up. But I really like the content blocks on the side, I think they’re something the rest of the search engines would do well to copy. It does bring context to otherwise overlooked blog entries, videos, images, and of course, our beloved Wikipedia.
I actually enjoyed reading this review, loved ‘The (Inevitable) Conclusion,’ that’s so true! Anyway, nice review, I’m going to be keeping an eye on SearchMash for sure now! 🙂
Glad you like it. You might want to check out Microsoft’s Live.com and Start.com for some more food-for-thought if you like. 🙂
If you are down serveral pages in your search list and then follow a link that you are interested in, when you hit the back button to return to the list you have to start from the top of the list again to scroll down to the location you were previously at.
Very annoying 🙁
Hi Larry,
Try pressing the <Backspace> button on your Keyboard instead in Internet Explorer. And in Firefox, hold down <Control> and then scroll the mouse one step back.
Thanks for the feedback. Is there a way to get more that 100 matches?
Unfortunately backspace on the keyboard has the same effect … I’m using IE7
I’m on IE7 too (albeit on Windows Vista), and ctrl+scroll, the back button, and the backspace key all work perfectly and take me back to my exact location on the SearchMash results page (or any other page for that matter).
I didn’t notice that 100-result limit, nice catch Larry! Then again, I never looked more than 3-pages deep on any given Google search – so I don’t know if anyone actually looks that far down.
At any rate, I can’t see any possible workaround, given as there are no GET variables (or even POST for that matter!) and the JavaScript function
Does nothing unless a link is clicked :@
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