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June 2007 InfoTip: Search Engine Experimentation
Are you one of those people who jump at the chance to be a beta tester of a new product or service? Or do you wait until someone else has served as guinea pig and all the glitches have been worked out? If you're the former, you probably also hang out in the test areas of the search engines, where they introduce new features and get user feedback. One of those test areas is SearchMash, Google's new experimental user interface, which I wrote about
last month.
You might also want to check out the other play areas of the search engines:
- Google Labs, where you can see everything from Google's
voice-activated local search, through which you can hear search results spoken to you over the phone, to Google's
Page Creator, a super-easy web page builder. Many of Google's most useful features started out in the Lab, including Google News, Google Scholar, and Google Maps.
- Yahoo Next, which includes such gems as
Yahoo Mindset,
Yahoo Search Subscriptions,
and Open Shortcuts.
- MSN Sandbox, which features search
results clustering at an unbranded MSN
search site.
One of Google's more intriguing Lab projects is called
Google
Experimental, which lets you opt in to a variety of tests of new interfaces. Right now, these include a timeline feature that groups search results by date, keyboard shortcuts to reduce mousing to navigate search results, and left-hand and right-hand navigation tool bars, that help you narrow and focus your searches.
Whether or not you find any of these useful, they offer an intriguing look at where search engines
might be going in the next 6 to 12 months.
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