Mixing Search Results Is a Snap

Snap.com is trying to boost its audience by including website previews in search results, and revenues by commingling natural and paid search results.

While purists may not like it, mixing search results can benefit users as long as ads are relevant, clearly marked, and do not dominate the top results. Snap also has an "autocomplete" feature that anticipates what you are looking for and offers suggestions for more specific searches, such as adding the word "value" if you type in baseball cards. It doesn't appear that sponsored links are shown here, but that would seem to be a natural fit.

For me, the website preview feature is useful only in the cases when the keywords have been fudged to link to irrelevant content. Snap scrubbed out most of the adult sites from its results, but parents may not appreciate the previews of adult sites that are automatically generated.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is working technology for searching across corporation's computers and the Internet. Office SharePoint Server for Search 2007 is more robust technology than Windows Live Search, which is aimed at consumers and competes with Google's search utilities. No rest for the Google workers.