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Google Launches Experimental Search Engine: Page 2 of 3

"One of the important factors we wanted to address was the influence that may come from Google branding," she said. "Creating a separate site will help us gather more objective data about user response to new interfaces."

As to how Google can get sufficient traffic to a site that hasn't been publicized: "We have various methods for driving traffic to search and UI (user interface) experiments that we run, however, we do not share details regarding the methodology to help keep the results as objective as possible," the spokesman said. She declined to say how many people have visited SearchMash.

SearchMash features include the ability to rearrange the order of text results by simply dragging them to any position. The results are numbered and listed on the left. Image results are listed on the right.

In addition, clicking the green URL of a result opens a menu of options, including opening the site in the current or new window, getting a list with descriptions of other pages on the site, or similar pages on the Web.

Finally, the search engine lists the first 10 results, but users can click a "more results" bar at the bottom to load the next 10 items and scroll down to view them. Users can add as many sets of items as they want.