Search Engines

All the companies playing catchup to Google have recently brought out new interfaces to their engines. Google have been a staunch follower of the simplistic design approach with a minimalist front page and adverts that are incredibly unobtrusive when compared to their competitors. The competitors have obviously taken note that users maybe actually like looking at nice things and not some mess of animated red/black/purple blinking/scrolling/fading in 20 boxes all packed together on the page.

• MSN Search is completely different and a definite follower of the subtle aproach. They also offer the choice to search the ‘Web’, ‘Images’ or ‘News’, just like Google. The colours nicely tie in with the usual microsoft windows colour scheme.
• Yahoo! has also gone for a much cleaner look and their frontpage is almost, well, nice. The pastel colours are such a difference compared to the cluttered look they had before. The search page also allows you to turn on an off particular searches and regions which is a very nice feature.
• AOL‘s search page surprised me the most. The choice of font, the subtle greys and the green and blue colour scheme reminded me of technorati. I like it. AOL have also pushed the boat out a bit with a ‘dropdown’ of your last searches. Remarkably reminiscent of Google’s Suggest functionality. It is not quite as slickly done but they’re trying.
• Amazon are also up to something. They have their Alexa search engine which aswell as spidering pages on the ‘net and using data from Google, feeds on data sent from users running the Alexa toolbar. User’s send Alexa data on all your browsing activities (privacy anyone?) and it uses this to gauge what are the most popular sites (amongst other things). But then there is a9.com which seem to tie A9, Google, Google image search, imdb and guru-net all together. It is very nicely done with some clever scripting malarky which allows you to turn on and off certain result frames and resize them dynamically. All this content of course is just an excuse to cross-market amazon products to you. Strangely A9 doesn’t always see to pimp amazon products all the time, but then they are getting heaps of data from all the search terms people enter.

Overall the engines seem to be providing a richer, more immediate experience on their search pages. Whilst managing to restrain themselves from packing them with ads and cross-marketing scripts. Amazon of course is the wildcard as they are primarily a retailer, they are out to sell things to people. They are going to amass an awful lot of data on users. If people use Alexa as another search engine then amazon will have a fantastically rich source of data to market their products with. They could know what people are interested in and what they are thinking about buying from their Alexa data and then reposition their marketing strategy to reap the most benefit from this.