Snap is a new search engine that offers a very different alternative to the Big Search, Text-In, Text-Out, method. Snap is visual, fast and interactive.

Snap Screenshot

I played around with Snap, which you can see in the screenshot above. It starts with a basic Ajax-powered suggested search field. Next, your results are listed in a <div> on the left side of the page. On the right is a screenshot of the highlighted target page from your results list. For most search results, the page contained in the main window on the right is totally interactive. You don't need to leave your search results in order to dig into the page you've returned. Just click on the preview image and the live site is loaded. This "visual preview" is pretty fast, but the user interface still suffers from some latency problems. The project is brand new, so the developers will probably get it moving much faster given a little time.

The relevancy algorithm that Snap uses relies on the anonymous search behavior data of its users. If a user searches for "monkey," and then spends more time on one particular returned site than all of the others, that site will be treated as more relevant the next time somebody searches for the same term.

Snap can be considered a browser-based application rather than just a simple search engine. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the live preview of your results pages is downright revolutionary. How long until Google starts doing these split-window searches with live previews?