Snap Redone
It pays to pay attention.
I wrote a few months back that Snap was a search engine with great potential but little seems to have been accomplished. I had been a subscriber to the Snap RSS feed, but they went a long time without posting (Note: it may help to post at least once a month to let visitors know your company is still alive). So I unsubcribed and forgot about Snap.
I was on the Alexa site last week and saw Snap was one of the movers and shakers (up 1400% or something like that). What was going on with Snap?
Upon re-visiting Snap, I saw that much had been accomplished. Their blog mentions a relaunch on May 15th 2006. Things are indeed different.
Snap takes a different approach to search. Of course, the input is the same: a string of words of some sort. The difference appears in the results.
First, when keywords are being typed into the search box, Snap provides a popup list of recommended/possible searches. One might think this is similar to Google Suggest. However, it is different. Google Suggest provides only linear (or some might say anchor left) results. Type in “recommended” and get a long list of things following “recommended:”
- recommended daily allowance
- recommended calorie intake
- recommended books
- etc
Snap employs whole string querying and alternative form results. Type in “recommended” and the suggested search terms include items like “letters of recommendation”. While this approach to “suggest” technology is better, it still has to be improved. However, Snap learns from what users enter. The more users search, the better the search suggestion list becomes.
Second, Snap search results are not solely text based. A preview window is provided that displays the webpage of the text based result. This is similar to functionality provided by the French search engine Exalead. However, the preview is much larger (at least 10x) and easier to read than the preview provided by Exalead. Plus, with Snap, users can click on the preview and a “live” version of the website is loaded in the Snap preview window.
Do visually based search results help the searcher?
Yes. They prevent clicking to numerous non-relavent websites. The preview lets searchers know immediately if the site is relevant or not.
I am going to make Snap my default search engine for a while and see how it goes. Snap does provide an exciting shift in search engine practice. It will be interesting to see where things go from here.
[tags]search, snap[/tags]
Posted by Paul Flyer on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 in Search Engines
