What is Snap?
Snap is a new kind of search engine; it not only
goes out and retrieves results for you, but the more people use it, the smarter it gets. From the
Snap
About Us page:
"Instead of just relying on computer algorithms to rank search results, Snap also uses click-stream information from a network of one million Internet users. By recording and processing which Web sites users spend time on, and which sites they quickly leave, Snap improves the likelihood that the search results you get will be the results you're really looking for."
How To Search With Snap
Searching with Snap is a (you knew this was coming) snap. Just navigate to the
Snap home page
and type in a search query.
The home page is a bit different looking than most search engines. Snap displays the most
popular searches, with the search count, underneath the main search bar, as well as news results.
As you type in your search, let's say xbox, you'll notice that those Popular Search
results change instantly to relate to your search. For example, my popular searches now are
xbox 360, xbox cheats, xbox games, etc. The news results change as well, reflecting news search results
that are in some way related to my original query.
Snap Search Options
Snap has tabbed search options on the top of the search bar; these are Web, Classic, Shopping,
News, and Jobs. I'll go through these one by one with my guinea pig search term of "xbox."
Snap Web, Snap Classic
Snap Web and Snap Classic are inter-related; basically, it's just two different ways of viewing the
same data. Snap Web view grabs the main page related to your query - in my case it's the Xbox home page-
and displays it as a preview on the right hand side of the search results, with text
results on the left. You can toggle to the
next result or view the site itself by using the navigation buttons on the top of this window.
Snap Classic was my preferred view. The search results are on the right hand side, with small
preview thumbnails of each page. To the left were those Popular Searches again - reminiscent of
clustering, always a feature I appreciate in search engines, since most of the time these
searches are better than what I come up with.
Snap Shopping
Snap's shopping feature is powered by Smarter.com. However, I was really, really surprised that
nothing came up shopping-wise for my search query of xBox, not even xBox 360. The only results that came back
were sponsored results (ads). A more generic search for
socks
returned better results. A highly coveted (and highly popular) item such as the xBox should've brought
back a ton of targeted results - this is something that Snap, still in beta at the time of this writing,
needs to work on.
Snap News
I like the look of Snap News - in fact, I liked the overall design and look of this entire site.
Snap News brings back news that feature whatever your search query is, with a preview pane to the
right. There are tabbed categories within the News search results that you can use to narrow
down your results; these include Top Stories, World, US, Business, and more.
Snap Jobs
Snap's Job search is powered by
SimplyHired, an excellent job search engine, and the results
are presented in much the same way as Snap News. You can create job alerts within Snap, as well as
search within job titles, by date posted, by company,by city, by distance, etc.
Why Should I Use Snap?
While I wasn't completely bowled over by Snap, I found it to be a good, solid search engine that delivered relatively good results.
I really liked that Snap displayed the most popular searches for whatever term I typed in - this was a very handy feature. Right now,
Snap is still in beta, and I'll be watching to see what kind of features and improvements they roll out next.
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