‘The other way to search’

GOOGLE is so popular that, by convention, it has become a verb, meaning, “to search on the World Wide Web.” Comes now Snap, a search engine that calls itself, “The Other Way to Search.”

Saying Google and the other “big search players have settled on the wrong search paradigm,” Snap promises to give users a better search experience that is not only more interactive, but is faster and more productive.

What Snap sells as its most unique feature is its visual interface. While today’s popular search engines use purely text, Snap has a two-panel interface that shows the search results on the left, and a preview of each ranked page on the right.

Click here for an example of a Snap interface, showing the results for a search, for news and other pages, for “juvenile justice philippines.” And click here for the results of the same search on Google.

Thus for those users who are more visual, Snap could work better. “Users can better judge a result to be good for their search if they see it rather than read it,” says Snap.

Talking about itself, Snap says: “The Snap Results-Left/Preview-Right interface concept eliminates much of the guesswork of search, and thus greatly reduces the number of unproductive back and forth clicks to determine if a site is worth your time.”

Snap is owned by Idealab in Pasadena, California. The group describes itself as “a small group fighting a big battle to deliver a step-function change in the search experience.”

Are Web users ready for such change? Google, for instance, is almost like a habit for the 200 million or so people estimated to be using it every single day.

By mid-2004 it was estimated that Google had indexed some 4.28 billion webpages, 880 million pictures and 845 million Usenet messages — six billion in all. Google constantly upgrades its features, and, for instance, enables users to access cached pages for those that are removed from their sites or whose sites are down at the time that a search hits it.

So do you think that Snap can threaten the primacy of Google any time soon? Maybe it won’t, at least not yet. For now, maybe it does offer Internet users a refreshing twist to doing online search.