Google recently launched a new testing site, SearchMash. It’s an interesting concept for multiple reasons but mostly because it is a live user experience test for their flagship product. The quote from Google about SearchMash goes something like this, “The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users.” It’s a great idea to field test something like this in a live environment and get data on the fly, I wish there were more companies doing it this way. It will be great when they start to integrate the findings into the actual Google search. I like what I see so far in things like bringing images to the same search results page, a separated call out for Wikipedia entries, and collapsable boxes. If they went one step further and made the boxes customizable like on the personalized Google Homepage (ability to “resize” and reorder) then this would be my default search engine.

The linking option menu is a nice touch as well, I especially like the “More from this site option” where it narrows the search to one particular site. They were also clever in adding a simple survey, “were these results useful to you?” in the right hand column. I think they should integrate AdSense next and see what users do.