Comments on: Snap Preview shows websites without clicking links!

By: Gary King

Gary King — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:17:21 +0000

It might be a good idea, but still, the script should be as generic as possible. For instance, Google doesn’t extract specific information that it deems important from specific websites, because it’s a generic search engine that shows the generic stuff (page title, URL, etc.) to you instead of showing specific things for specific websites, like news or magazine sites.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:04:18 +0000

How about extracting the headlines and minus the scrolling for a news magazine site?

By: Gary King

Gary King — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 18:44:15 +0000

Adam,

That wouldn’t work, because how would the script know which text to pull from a website? What if it pulled the navigation bar instead of the content? Then it wouldn’t be useful. Also, scrolling text, or almost anything animated on a web page, that isn’t activated by the user, is not very good aesthetics for a website.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 18:23:55 +0000

What if they took a sample of the small font from the site and add it on the preview as a scrolling marquee? That could work.

By: Gary King

Gary King — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:15:23 +0000

It’s not Flash; it’s Ajax. Anyways, on certain websites, it would be useful, and on others, not so much. For instance, a website that does a lot of website reviews would maybe find it more useful than a website with a forum, where the text is so tiny that you can’t read it, anyways.

By: Blake

Blake — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:09:14 +0000

It’s a nice bit of flash, but it serves no real purpose. For all practical purposes it’s just an unnecessary nuisance.

By: Gary King

Gary King — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 02:49:14 +0000

Adam,

Why’d you mention Jerry? Also, that link in my comment IS Google Preview

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 02:47:08 +0000

Have you tried Google Preview? A firefox extension, it’s not as comprehensive as the system you describe but it does elaborate on Google searches. Jerry, can we please not fight on Gary’s blog, you’re being inconsiderate.

By: Gary King

Gary King — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 05:16:33 +0000

Yeah, although I think that if you added anything else to the popups, they’d be pretty bloated already since they look very minimal – and it looks like they have just the right amount of content and used up space in the popup.

Also, if you like this preview feature, you might want to take a look at this as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/189/

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 19:07:30 +0000

What else could we put in the popups? Maybe website reviews, del.icio.us tags, Google PageRank, or other data? The popups look great and I’d certainly like to have them wherever I browse.

Strategically I think it makes a great Google extension or browser advanced feature. Maybe Google could add it to the Google Toolbar.