Potential Google competition? IceRocket is the new kid on the block, and looks to be a site that might just steal some of Google’s users.

The main similarity to Google is the uncluttered homepage which is quick to load. However, it has features Google doesn’t:

• Thumbnail views of the sites in your search results. It is possible to turn this off if you’re not into this kind of feature or it is hindering page load time.
• Quick View of the search result pages. Clicking on the Quick View for a site will bring up the site in a frame underneath the summary. You can alter the size of the View and bookmark the site all from the results page.
• Extra info and data about the search results: info about loading times and rankings, and a link to the web archive.

Sadly some of the features don’t work in Firefox (I used IE to check out the full range of result features) and I’m not sure how many of these features are necessary enough to switch from Google but still, it’s an interesting look at the kind of information that engines can provide to searchers.