Firstly, for those of you just voting for a popular friend, please also spare a moment to vote for me. Not only would it make my summer holiday (quite literally) but could really improve Snap, making it a more social, community driven place – read on straight to point 1.

And for the many of you interested in marketing and the future of Snap, enjoy and please vote! The first x points cover new features, and from there is standard promotion.

1: Social integration

Web 2.0 is dominating the internet. For those of you non geeks (jokies), sites like Myspace, facebook and MSN spaces are most popular at the moment. The idea of giving everybody an opportunity to share their views, interests, knowledge – is a powerful one. Not only it creates an engaged and interested community, but it means more users - and more profit.

This is why I feel Snap needs to become a more community driven site. Being able to sign up for a profile and add friends would be good, but being able to share favourite searches would be a step up from the rest.

Think of the power of a successful social networking site combined with the power of a large search engine. Imagine a search engine where, by searching normally, you could “virtually” meet people like you. Chat to them. Email them. Of course privacy issues would need to be addressed, but the idea is that Snap would almost create your profile for you, based on your everyday internet activity.

Also, if you’ve tried Stumble (stumbleupon.com), you’ll know how fun and addictive it is to find websites “like” the one you’re on now, or recommended ones in a particular category. It’d be nice to see a similar system integrated with the search engine.

2: Sticky homepage

Search is great. But if you don’t happen to have anything to search for at a moment in time, it’s useless. I think that even Google have proved this – even if you don’t have anything to search for, there’s tonnes to do at Google labs!

This is why I believe that, whilst the great lookin’ homepage should keep it’s clean and simple look, it needs some extra, customisable content.

Similarly to Google News email updates, news updates could be displayed on the user’s homepage corresponding to the users “favourite” search terms. They could become “favourite” either by the user pressing a button manually or automatically.

Other examples could include weather updates or RSS feeds from the user’s favourite forums. Be inspired by Google.com/ig or Yahoo J

3: More customisable experience

Going again with the idea of customisation, it would be good if the user could customise their colour scheme. After all, I see results are already moulded on user’s past experience – good stuff.

4: Increase repeat users

Place the search box in front of your users. With over 1,000,000 users, Mozilla Firefox is great. There’s even a nice little bar in the top right corner for you to Google the web. But we want to snap the web!

There’s already a snap search add-on to add search functionality right to the top right of your FF browser, yet this hasn’t been promoted! At the very least, advertise this feature on your homepage to all firefox users.

And for IE users, either do a toolbar (although these aren’t too popular) or do something similar to desktop search. If the search box is already there, users will use it!

5: Increase brand strength, plus gain repeat and new users

The great thing about promoting a search engine is that it can, effectively, promote itself. Sorry if that didn’t make much sense but…

You could set up a trail of questions or tasks – research, riddles, puzzles, spanning a series of several days or maybe weeks, with some good prizes at the end. To find the answers, users must use the snap search engine. Not only would users get used to the interface, but they’d learn a lot from snap and trust the brand, not to mention telling friends.
Without anybody knowing about it, this last point would be useless. I believe the game would need to be themed, and sponsored by a popular TV series, game etc. to be effective. Obviously the Da Vinci code would be fantastic, but would top the budget a bit!

6: Search boxes on individual's sites

Due to the huge recent increase in personal websites (i.e. from social networks), it would be great to get a good number of individual people putting snap search boxes on their sites.

I think Google have fallen short of this, as smaller sites don’t really have any incentive as have to get up to $100 credit. Based on what people search for from each particular website, you could provide some sort of automatic content to websites with the search boxes. This could integrate well with point 1.
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Anyway, if you’ve read this far, I’m honoured! I’d be even more honoured if you spare me a vote – and please do comment back on the ideas or email me harveycarpenter (at) gmail.com.