In Search of… Better Ways to Search at the Wall Street Journal goes through the different ways search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com use “spin off” sites to test new features. We have reported about all these in the past, but the article offers a nice overview of many of the methods search engines test features.
- Google’s Test Site: SearchMash.com
- Yahoo’s Test Sites: AllTheWeb and AltaVista
- Microsoft’s Test Site: Ms Dewey
- Ask.com’s Test Site: Ask X
The search engines also constantly test out new features to a subset of their users on their main sites.