I’ve been using Google’s SearchMash for a while now. However it hasn’t been updated in a while … that is until now. A new Flash based version of SearchMash is now available for people to experiment with. I’m really enjoying using the new version, when you single click on a search result you get a preview pane with a thumbnail of the site along with other information. Whilst it might be argued that the Flash version is slower than the original AJAX based version, the new version is a big leap forward in terms of it’s aesthetics. I am curious as to whether releasing a Flash version of SearchMash was a tit-for-tat response to Microsoft’s SilverLight based Tafiti. I guess the difference between the two is that whilst the new Flash based version of SearchMash is more aesthetically pleasing than the original, it’s still very usable. The problem with Tafiti is that whilst it is gorgeous, I find myself falling back to Google or SearchMash because the results are presented more clearly and simply.
Try it out for yourself: http://www.searchmash.com/flash/search/
It requires Flash version 9.