… and I was the first person to discover it! On Monday morning I did my usual Google search for ‘searchmash’ to see who was linking to me, and I was surprised to see http://www.searchmash.com come up as the first result. I looked at the site, discovered from whois and the privacy policy that Google were running it, though trying to be low-key about it.

I posted to Google Blogoscoped about my discovery, and it mushroomed from there. It’s fun being part of a news story, and I’m glad to see Google trying some really different looks to their interface.

I’ve also got a lot of traffic from the news, it’s been great to have so many people discover my SearchMash, I really couldn’t have paid for that sort of publicity. It’s interesting to compare their approach to mine too; they’re providing a new interface but with the same information, whereas I’ve stuck pretty closely to their original interface, but try to offer some extra information on top.