Over on Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz points out that Google has added a "page preview" feature that allows the searcher to see what a page looks like before clicking on the link.
Barry's post includes screenshots. However, Google previews are easy to access (assuming they're available). Run any Google Search expand the "Show Options" link right below the search box. At the very bottom of list you should spot "page previews." Click the link and now, if available (at this point, page previews are not available for every page), a static image of the page should appear to the right of the title, snippet, and link.
The Search Engine Land post mentions that page previews are far from a new phenomenon.
Ask.com used to offer them and Clusty continues to provide previews. In fact, they were available even before Vivisimo's meta search tool was rebranded as Clusty. We still think they are a very powerful tool. run a Clusty search, next to each result title notice the magnifying glass, click it and a live version (you can actually click the links) of the result is embedded directly into the results set. Click it again, and it's gone.
Exalead continues to offer to page previews. It's something they have been doing for years. First, you can add "previews" of your favorite pages on Exalead home page and each result also contains a preview image. Here's an example.
Last Friday, we mentioned a new beta of a metasearch tool from the National Institutes of Health Library. This database from Web4Lib also provides the embedded page preview option.
As Barry Schwartz points there have been and continue to be several add-on tools that offer page previews/thumbnails. Two add-ons for Firefox that are still available Better Search and SearchPreview (works for Bing, Yahoo, and Google).
Finally, one tool we use all of the time is CoolPreviews. With it you can simply cursor over any link on any page and see the view the page in browser window. Since the page is live, all of the hyperlinks are active. CoolPreviews is free and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. We think if you try it, you'll like it. (-:
UPDATE: We failed to mention that Bing offers video previews. Yes, video. Run a video search and place your cursor of a result. Approximately 30 seconds of the video will play (from various points within the clip) with audio. Clicking the speaker icon will mute the sound. Cool!
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