Search Engine Shoot-Out

Smart Interface Tricks

The best search-result pages provide links to related items, even if the pages don't include your exact query (a great Beatles photo when you query "John Lennon", for example). It also helps if they know a little about you: If your IP address indicates that you live in the United States and you query "civil war", you're probably interested in the American Civil War and are looking for a war timeline, maps of the conflict, or maybe even biographies of Generals William T. Sherman and Robert E. Lee.

Other sites are improving the user experience in different ways. For instance, Live Search has a "Smart Scroll" feature for image results. As you scroll down a collection of image thumbnails, the page reloads itself, adding thumbnails on the fly. Since there's no pagination, you don't have to click a link to load more images. In addition, Live Search's Scratchpad is a handy visual-bookmarking tool; you can drag images from the results page and drop them in the Scratchpad column on the right. When you're scrolling through dozens or even hundreds of images, the Scratchpad makes it easier to track shots you want for a report or presentation.

Not every interface trick works, even if it seems clever at first. Ask.com's Binoculars feature, for example, allows you to preview certain site results in a pop-up window by holding your pointer over results that have a binoculars icon associated with them. But for text-page previews, the large thumbnails don't provide enough detail to help you determine the page's content.

Chart: Find the Perfect Pics

Image-search specialists such as Picsearch couldn't best the accuracy and clear interface of Google's top-scoring image-search component. Click the icon below to see how the tested engines performed, including their scores in each round.