SearchMash

» see searchmash.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Google ran a search engine for two years that did not say Google anywhere on it. That was not a disguise for its own sake. It was the method.

SearchMash appeared in October 2006 with no announcement and no branding, and the search industry worked out who owned it fairly quickly from the WHOIS record and the result quality. Google's stated reasoning, once it stopped pretending, was that the brand distorts the feedback. Show a person a Google page and they grade it against what they already believe Google is. Show them an unfamiliar site and they tell you whether the thing in front of them actually works.

So the site became a place to try interfaces that the main page could never risk. Results came back blended rather than sorted into tabs, so images and Wikipedia entries sat in the same list as the web links. Page previews ran through Snap, a third-party service, which is a remarkable thing for Google to have outsourced. There were separate implementations in Ajax and in Flash, built so the same ideas could be compared in two technologies.

The one everybody remembers is the scrolling. In 2007 SearchMash dropped result pagination and let you keep going down a single list, years before infinite scroll became the default pattern everywhere else on the web. Google Search still has pages. The experiment worked and the finding did not ship.

TechCrunch wrote the obituary on 24 November 2008, headlined as a question because Google had not answered it. There was no post and no farewell page.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the lab with no logo ~

The honest part of SearchMash is how unusual the premise was for a company of that size. Running an unbranded product is an admission that your brand is strong enough to corrupt your own research, and most companies will not say that out loud. Google built the whole site around the admission.

It kept the secret badly and did not seem to mind. By the time Google publicly acknowledged the site in October 2007, roughly a year in, everyone who cared had known for months.

~ the week it was most needed ~

Google launched SearchWiki in late November 2008, which let signed-in users reorder and annotate their own search results. It was the most intrusive change to the results page Google had attempted, and it was exactly the kind of idea SearchMash existed to pre-test on people who did not know they were testing Google.

Google shut SearchMash down instead, in the same week. The sandbox was retired immediately before the experiment it was built for.

~ what the industry saw ~

This was a search-marketing story rather than a consumer one. The people who visited SearchMash read Search Engine Watch and InfoWorld, and they visited it the way you check a competitor's beta, looking for a signal about where the real product was going. Turkish SEO forums of that period were reading the same English-language sources a week late, which is roughly how most Google-internal news reached anyone here.

Nobody outside that readership ever had a reason to type the address. SearchMash was a research instrument with a public URL, and when the research ended there was nothing else for it to be.

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