Is Search Today Good Enough?
Those of us who do a lot of searching know that search could be better. A lot better. Consider these realities of the frequent searcher:
- Frequent searchers use three or more search engines
- 50% of searches end in failure
- Total round trip time for an average search is 15 minutes
What's wrong with search today? We think Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the rest of the big search players have settled on the wrong search paradigm: text-in, text-out. While there are slight differences in their ranking methods and the size of their indexes,
the search experience offered by Big Search is exactly the same. 
Snap — The other way to Search
Snap is a new search engine that offers a very different alternative to the Big Search, Text-In, Text-Out, method. Snap is visual. Snap is fast. Snap is Interactive.
The Snap Difference #1: Fast Visual Display of Results Previews
We believe the visual display of data along with text is better than text alone. Users can better judge a result to be good for their search if they see it rather than read it. When Snap returns results, we show you a preview of the result. 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.
We call this Fast Browsing. Want to learn more?
The Snap Difference #2: Actively Anticipating Your Intent
From the moment you type one letter in our search box, Snap begins to actively anticipate your intent. A drop down menu appears instantly, offering popular search terms, synonyms,
and other suggestions that greatly speed your search experience. Get searching to try it out!
The Snap Difference #3: Direct Interactivity with Your Search Results
Snap allows direct interactivity with the preview site, without having to leave your results behind. You can plug in your dates and destinations for travel, you can pick the car make and model or you can copy those lyrics - all while still having access to your results list. In addition, for those of you power users who like this feature, but want it on all the time, we offer an Active-X preview control, which makes this direct interactivity the default mode.
The Snap Difference #4: Better Relevance through Successful Past Searches
Your search results are better with Snap because our ranking algorithm takes advantage of the prior behavior of millions of anonymous searches*. By analyzing past search behaviors, we know which sites are visited more often, the average time users spend there, and if they took any action. In addition to behavioral data from all across the Internet, Snap incorporates User Contributed Ratings (See Image Below) - a beta feature where we let You rate Your results on Snap. All of these clues help us determine if the site is right for your specific search.
The Snap Difference to You: Faster Speed to Satisfaction
Getting you to your end destination as fast as possible is our mission. We call this Speed to Satisfaction and it has very little to do with how quickly a page downloads and everything to do with how quickly one can make sense of the data once it's presented.
So, we invite you to try Snap and experience The other way to Search. We hope you like it and tell your friends.
* Please see our
Privacy Policy.
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Understanding Today's "Standard" Search Experience
How People Search Today
Americans did more than 5 billion searches in December 2005, a 55% increase from the previous year. Most industry experts believe this is just the beginning - not the end - of search's popularity as Google, Yahoo and the rest announce new features every week that either expand the data searched, or add a new twist on how it's searched. Clearly, "search" is becoming the entry point into the Web for many people. Only email is a more popular Internet activity. Along with search's increasing popularity comes a new level of frustration. Yahoo's own research claims that about half the time people can't find what they're looking for when they search. And even though Google is the Gold Standard of search, most people who use Google use more than one search engine in their quest to "find it" as quickly as possible. What's going on here? Simply stated, as search becomes more important in our daily Internet lives, we're spending way too much time at it. Those of us who search frequently are even more frustrated with a search experience that is inefficient and full of guessing "is that what I'm looking for?" Here's the typical search experience. Sound familiar?
- Type a keyword into a search box and hit enter
- Wait a bit, then
- get a list of 20 or so text results split into non-paid and sponsored links
- Proceed to decipher each link and excerpt (does this site have what I'm looking for? Is it spam?)
- Click on a link and go to the site. If you're lucky, that's it.
- But most of us aren't lucky, so you go back to your results page and begin the process again.
- And repeat as often as needed for as long as your patience can muster (Most searchers don't get off the first page of results, even though we're comforted that there are millions of results for some of our queries).
- If this doesn't yield the result you're looking for, you probably go back to the original query and try a new modification.
- And repeat the process again as needed.
This is a very inefficient process because there's a lot of guesswork involved. Gord Hotchkiss,
"The Search Experience has a De Facto Standard (For Now)" from the Search Insider does a pretty good job of explaining
"Information scent says that most cues on a Web page have an inherent information scent about what could lie behind the cue. Every hyperlink or navigation option offers some "residue" of what we will find when we click on it. We assess all the cues on a page, and typically go to where this scent is the strongest. On a search engine, we have been conditioned to believe that this scent will be strongest in the top organic listings. We naturally move towards these. The top sponsored ads happen to be in the path between where we typically orient ourselves (upper left corner) and where we want to go to pick up the information scent. Because of their position, they have a good chance of catching our attention. This behavior creates the Golden Triangle we identified in our first eye tracking study. So, is position enough? No, we do want to verify this by confirming the scent on the individual listings. And here is an important point to remember. On the average, we take about six seconds to scan listings before we choose one on a search results page, and in that time, we scan four or five results (this is based on our previous research). But it takes about six or seven seconds just to read one listing. So we're not reading them. We're scanning them, and this is a crucial difference. In scanning them, we're looking for patterns of words that seem to offer scent. This is the semantic mapping I talked about in a previous Search Insider (I'd Love to Search but Words Get in the Way ). We're spending no more than a second (or less than a second) to pick up whether there's a pattern of words that offer the information residue we find most closely matches our intent. It's a split-second decision."
What Do People Want in Search?
"Speed to Satisfaction" What makes a great search experience? Not surprisingly, all the research we've seen and conducted points to the same three important attributes of a good experience: (1) Relevant results. Not as easy as it might at first seem since relevance is a purely subjective concept when it comes to search. We tend to think of good relevance as the absence of the bad stuff - spam and stupid results; (2) Speed. People want a fast response time; (3) Comprehensiveness of results. People want to make sure that their search engine has covered it all — there's a certain comfort when we have 1,183,472 results to pick from. We think, it's got to be in there right? OK, sounds simple enough: relevant results, delivered fast, all from a comprehensive list of potential candidates. However, it's not really that simple because when you ask the people behind the research numbers what they want from search, most say something like, "I just want to do what I need to do as fast as possible." And doing what they need to do means more than just quickly finding what they're looking for, it also means doing what they ultimately intended to do (to get informed about a subject, find out what DVD player to buy or get the telephone number of the Apple store down the street). We call this increasing the Speed to Satisfaction. Increasing Speed to Satisfaction has very little to do with the time that it takes to download a page, and everything to do with how quickly one can make sense of the data once it's presented. Hence, while Google and Yahoo return results instantly, they actually impede Speed to Satisfaction because it's so difficult to actually use the data. Isn't there a better way of getting from A to B? Yes, but you have to be willing and able to re-invent the current query-in, text-back search paradigm. And that's what we at Snap have been doing these past 18 months. We've invented the new way of searching that increases Speed to Satisfaction.
How To Fast-Browse with Snap
[Back to Top] Most of us do a lot of scanning of results sets once we've done a search. We're looking to find "it" as fast as possible. With Snap, the fastest way to scan is using our Fast Browsing navigation technique as illustrated below:
Snap's Targeted Content
[Back to Top] In the world of search, not all queries are created equal. For instance, some queries occur much more often than others. For others, the results format/framework should be different to best understand a results set. And for still others, the query is just a more convenient way to navigate to a particular site. Snap has created five targeted content to address some special, yet very popular queries.
Snap Coupon Widget
Snap Navigation/Company Widget
Snap Map Widget
Snap Weather Widget
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