(Really) Related Links
Everyone’s grown accustomed to (and tunes out as well) the links on the right in a typical Google search. They’re ads. Paid, useless, irrelevant, money-making links. Not any more they’re not, read on below!
- The Wikimedia Block
SearchMash.com has a really useful block on the side that basically looks for the top search results for any given search from the .wikipedia.org domain and lists them in a box. Really useful when you’re looking for research material or general info, and it doesn’t clutter the search results either if that’s not what you’re looking for.But what if the results of a Full-Text search happened to contain the data you want? What if Wikipedia’s top listings don’t have that one sentence you were looking for? Does this involve any vows or promises on Wikimedia’s side? Where does that leave both Google’s and Wikipedia’s users at the end of the day? Are we going to have another GoogleFox browser on our hands?
Many questions, no answers. At least not yet. They’re all interesting, but Wikipedia has proved time and time again its ability to adapt and live on. It looks like this could be the big break Wikipedia needs to make it to the real big leagues. Any site perpetually-listed on every Google search is bound to get exponentially more famous, really fast. Just keep an eye on Alexa!
- Inline Images
Just like the Wikimedia block, there’s another block on the side that displays the top-listed images relevant to your search. Nothing much to see here, just a quick way to see if the top 6 images are what you’re looking for or not.Besides the nicety-factor, we don’t really see much of a point to this. Add to it the overhead of pre-loading the images and the JavaScript required to power this box, and its not really much of a feature. Unless of course, Google has other plans on what it wants search to be. In that case, 6 may be just not enough however…
- Blog and Video Search
This makes use of Google’s latest sub-search engines, displaying the top 3 blog results and top 6 Google Video hits. Unfortunately you’re restricted to videos on Google’s own Video service provider, and not video hits in general. Thank god they didn’t restrict blog search-listings to Blogger.com only!It’s wonderful to see more focus no blogs and more of a general acceptance for this growing and very-much authentic portion of the web. It has a potential to be of very real value to search-engine users everywhere, especially if Google employs its “backrub” technique to the fullest.
Videos are more of a problem. How do you index the content of videos anyway? Ignoring time and money for the time being, its rather difficult to analyze their contents when even now we don’t have a decent speech recognition engine that doesn’t require training, and no AI to classify the contents, ambient noise, image type, or relevance of any given movie. Keeping all these factors in mind, it’s going to be hard to find anything more than a “most popular movies for this keyword” sort of result, and the relevance of such a listing, and even more importantly, its location on the front-page of search results becomes more than slightly questionable.
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 :@