You may feel relatively satisfied with the current search offerings of Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. Search today is undoubtedly much better than what it was in the second half of the 1990's. But Internet search is still in its infancy and there's much room for improvement. Moreover, the super high valuation of Google on NASDAQ pushes investors and researchers to find better search solutions - to be The Next Big Thing. And these wannabes are not only working on discovering better indexing techniques, they're exploring new horizons like vertical engines, meaning-based search, intent-driven search, new clustering methods, and much more. In this post, we look into latest trends in the search industry.

We have positioned the latest search trends into 3 main categories:

• UI Enhancements
• Technology Enhancements
• Approach Enhancements (Vertical Engines)

UI Enhancements

Snap promises a better interface for search, using the latest advancements in browsers and AJAX technology. Although there were earlier, similar implementations, preview powered search is perhaps the biggest innovation of Snap. With Snap's preview powered search, you don't necessarily need to visit the site to see if it satisfies your needs - you can see a dynamically loaded screenshot in the right side of your window.

According to a Microsoft study, users spend 11 minutes on a typical search - so potentially Snap can radically shorten this time. Another benefit is that it allows you browse the search results with a few key strokes, which is another big usability enhancement. However it's worth noting that Snap is slow to process searches as a result, because there's too much Javascript and it's too heavy for most modern browsers and hardware. Also, from a technology point of view, Snap doesn't have much to offer - it uses Ask's existing technology. However they have introduced a power of masses approach with options for "This page is Junk" and "This page is Perfect".

Snap's real time query recommendation is also a little similar to an idea once tested at Google Labs. All in all, Snap doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it's a good mashup of some of the innovative ideas in search that we've seen in the last few months.

SearchMash

SearchMash is actually a Google site, to test their latest search innovations. SearchMash follows the basic Google principle - it's cutting-edge, but still plain and simple. When you do a typical web search, you also see image, blog, video and Wikipedia results in the right side of the screen. And there's absolutely no noticeable speed loss, thanks to AJAX. Basically it is a shortcut to reach all the information you need.

The best innovation of SearchMash is perhaps the "More web results" bar. I strongly recommend Google find a way to implement it into their default engine immediately. It makes it much easier to browse the search results. When you need more information, simply click on "More web results" and new results appear at the bottom - enabling you to continue scrolling down on the same page, instead of opening a new page. SearchMash also allows you to give feedback about the results; this may be a sign of the introduction of power of masses into Google Search.

All in all, SearchMash shows that while Google continues to keep itself simple, it also has absolutely no intention of giving way on the innovation front to upcomers. All of the new features in SearchMash are discussed on their About page.

Next