Information Week has an article that says a new search engine site, SearchMash searchmash.com/, that allows it to try out new search features to see how people like them.
informationweek.com/management ...

Google was trying to keep its ownership of the site a secret, so as to not bias the people trying it out. Guess that idea's out.

IW found out about the ownership by looking at the privacy page searchmash.com/about/privacy.h ... which reveals the site is operated by Google.

A chance to let Google know what kinds of features you'd like added to the search page?

Sorry, that first sentence should say "that allows Google to try out..."

And I just found that there are already entries in blogoscoped that noticed the ownership. But the IW article has comments from Google explaining what it's about.

ohh, and the wikipedia article that says Google owns it!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearchMa ...

Poor google, they can't do anything secretly!

This was posted on earlier this month:
1. blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-1 ...
2. blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-1 ...

They're testing new features such as a Wikipedia box for every search result in place of the images box and the images box moved to the bottom.

A very useful feature as Wikipedia is the link I click a lot of the time anyway.

Ya I know Jack, I posted about it here.

blogoscoped.com/forum/74251.ht ...