I have been using this search engine for a while and I’ll give it the thumbs up. SearchMash is a search engine owned and operated by Google and is basically a test bed for Google to test out new interfaces and other user friendly features. True to Google style, it is very plain and appears to be no frills at the start.
But there are a few nifty things about it, that would probably appeal to lazy people (I’ll probably belong somewhere there too), such as not having to place your cursor in the search box query whenever you wish to query something up. Just type anything, and your term will appear in the search box and the current search term.
Another is the “more results” at the bottom of the page, just hit the space bar and the search automatically shows more search results for you.
SearchMash will display (for certain queries), some extra tabs to further help you to narrow down your search. These options are only available at the moment for certain queries, usually relating to health conditions, certain popular brands and celebrities. But I believe this feature will be expanded to cover more search terms as well.
As well as attempting to correct your query should you make a spelling mistake (just like the normal Google search), SearchMash will ask you if you wanted to search for another related keyword whenever you query a wide popular term. Example: Search “Asia” and SearchMash asks you if you were looking for “Asia map”.
However, what I like about SearchMash is the fact that the images that it comes up with are usually of a higher quality compared to the normal Google Search. Also, it allows for blog, video, wikipedia, image searching, and even Google Maps (for countries) all in one convenient spot, which is in the upper right sidebar, by just clicking the thumbnails. As SearchMash is new, I find there are a lot less spam site results appearing in the search results as opposed to the normal Google search, maybe due to a different, slimed down algorithm that isn’t targeted by search engine spammers.