Unanalog

A number of alternatives to the good ol' Google search interface are starting to create some buzz. I've started to play with two of them that offer pretty interesting features.
The first is Snap.com. You may have heard of Snap not for its search engine, but rather for its website enhancement that's pretty clever. With a tiny bit of Javascript magic (relying on the defer command), leaving your mouse over a link will display a snapshot of the link content. Snap is currently caching an impressive number of website snapshots and is supposedly increasing its coverage at lightspeed. Besides this feature, Snap is also a regular search engine that will display your query results on the left side of the screen, and a snapshot of each result you click on in the other half of the screen.
On Snap, the image search follows the same model. But this time it uses a Flash interface to incrementally display the images that have been found, and display the one you've clicked on on the right side, along with the image URL and size. It's quite nice to see the page getting populated by the pictures, and the preview size is quite large.
Next up is searchmash.com. A number of sites are reporting this is Google experimenting with a new search interface. I read this online, so it must be true. A few random tests I've made have given me the same results between Searchmash and Google, so it could really be true, unless this is a good service mashup. Anyway, the cool feature is that this engine packs on the same page traditional search results plus image results, blogs, videos, and wikipedia entries. On top of that, you can directly preview the videos inside that same page (Google videos only, wink wink...). Proof that this is an experimental site, a feedback section asks you whether the results for each category were useful to you.
While I can't give you any metrics as to the quality of the links that were found, I can comment about how the result were displayed. It seems Snap wins for the most stylish layout, albeit with a slower display, especially for the picture display (first the Flash plugin needs to be loaded, then the images are displayed as they are downloaded). Searchmash definitely gives you a pretty complete overview of all aspects of your search, even though the first have to expand all the search result sections before they are displayed. I did a few searches and counted how many results were displayed, here's what I got:
Text search (in number of links per screen): Google: 11, Snap: 15, Searchmash: 11.
Image search (in number of links per screen): Google: 20, Snap: 18, Searchmash: 6.
All searches were performed on a 1200 pixel high screen, in Safari, with tab display activated.
So after this test, am I still a Google fan? Yep! It seems to fully take advantage of Snap, you'll have to do a lot of clicking to see the site previews, which I don't believe is quite necessary since I'm quite fond of tabbed browsing, and I'll quite likely use that instead. The cool thing about searchmash is that it lets me directly access results that would have otherwise required me to go to specific sites for the search (videos + wikipedia), and the blog search is quite useful too. Let me know what you think.