I was listening to the latest net@Night show and AmberMac mentioned a new search service called SearchMash that grabs Google results and then puts them in categories. There are a few reasons why this could be very helpful.

• Which Horse’s Mouth? Where information comes from is a very important consideration when doing research. For example, blogs are vying for the credibility of journalists with reasonable success. However, the accessibility of blogging to the general public poses a problem for legitimate blog journalism as sorting out what is accurate or just an echo chamber around a headline is difficult when just searching. SearchMash separates image, blog, video, and Wikipedia results from the rest of the results so you can evaluate and target the source when browsing results.
• In-Place Multimedia The image and video sections in the right column allow you to browse six items from multiple locations at once - and this only if you click the “+” indicator that loads the content. You can then click to see more filtered results. For video, you can play the video right in the page without visiting the respective web sites. Tabs with Firefox and now IE7 have made the conventional way of doing this easier but this goes even further. Next time you want a “group stock photo” image, give it a try.
• Compact By Design People connect to the Internet via many devices and locations today so a little flexibility in a reference tool is nice. Remember those days of having to go to the City Library to access the encyclopedia and reference materials? SearchMash filters out image, video, blog, and Wikipedia entries by default and also has a ‘hide details’ option that will only show result headlines rather than the web address and two sentence summary for each. For small browser or limited bandwidth, this could come in very handy.

The biggest win to something like this is when you get to the results you wanted faster.

Did SearchMash save you some time? I would love to hear how you are making use of it so please drop a comment.

–jc

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 3:35 pm and is filed under mobile style, useful tools, jon cline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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