Yahoo! Alpha vs SearchMash

10Apr07

Is Yahoo! losing out to Google because there are just too many words on the Yahoo! homepage? Yahoo! seems to think so. Check out Yahoo! Alpha, the company’s new search engine. The homepage reminds you of Google doesn’t it? Dig a little deeper and you can also see it closely resembles Google’s unbranded search site called SearchMash.

But both ideas are not original. A9 made it possible some time ago to search different sources and cluster the results by sources:

Google’s gained a new unbranded site called SearchMash where it plans to test user interface ideas without Google’s brand somehow skewing the tests. Below, more about the site and comments from Google about it.

Currently, SearchMash allows you to perform a search and get web and image results presented side-by-side. It’s similar to how A9 has long allowed side-by-side results…

Google’s New SearchMash Test Site, ClickZ

While SearchMash results are organised as webpages, images, blogs, wikipedia etc. Yahoo! Alpha is more brand-centric. Results are clustered by Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, etc. SearchMash also asks “Are the results useful to you?” which, to me, is important.

Who will come out tops in the search engine slugfest? My crystal ball doesn’t work as well as the one TechCrunch has. IMHO, the audience will be divided. There will be two camps: those who want to customise their search and those who don’t.

Yahoo! Alpha offers the ability to add new search sources, customise the layout of the search results, etc. Yahoo! can do this because it already has a community of users, the by-product of being one of the first movers in web 1.0. SearchMash currently doesn’t offer this capability. You just have to live with the results that the search engine fetches.

However, it will come as no surprise if Google ends up offering customised search. It’s already begun a campaign of acquiring registered users through gmail, google analytics, and most recently, my maps. So the battle might continue with left hooks and right punches till someone or some company creates a search engine where you can simply add the results to your personal blog, del.icio.us, Google my map, myspace, etc?

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