The Google company is best known its search engine at google.com. The corporation offers a number of other features, to be sure, but most of them are clearly branded – Google Video, Google Maps, etc. Yesterday it was discovered that the search engine SearchMash is also run by Google.

SearchMash’s search results are very similar to those offered by the Google search engine. The difference lies in the presentation and the features.SearchMash includes some useful and ‘out there’ features that might not be right for Google.com, but could make a really interesting search engine.

SearchMash also displays a "menu of options by each result, letting you click to get ‘Open in this windows’, ‘Open in new windows’, ‘Open cached copy’, ‘More from this site’, ‘More similar pages’." Weinberg considered this "another great idea that would work well on regular Google," noting that "the code already exists there as part of the ‘More’ tab above the search box." 

Google’s new Search Sandbox (not to be confused with the other Google Sandbox) for playing with search result toys includes the addition of Ajax URL menus, integrated A9 style image search, and the ability for users to reorder their results.

Here’s a rundown of the features with image captures provided by Google SearchMash:

Auto Cursor in Search Box : No need to click on the search box to begin typing.

URL Menu : Click on the URL of a web site in the SearchMash result and the user is served with Google options for viewing that URL in a new window, in its cache form, more results from that site, or more similar pages.

Image results are served at the right of web search results.

When you click on the number next to a search result you can reorder it via dragging with other results. Google (or SearchMash) says that “This is just for fun right now, but we have some ideas for how to use this.”

Google has yet to officially comment on SearchMash, but the privacy policy makes its role perfectly clear. "SearchMash is a website operated by Google Inc.," declares the very first sentence. Google may have been trying to keep that connection quiet so as not to affect any of its SearchMash experiments, but the cat is clearly out of the bag and running loose in the blogosphere.

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