Exalead search engine shows website thumbnail previews

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search

Exalead search engine shows website thumbnail previews

by Brad Linder Sep 22nd 2007

Ever wish Google would let you see what a website looks like before you click a search result? Yeah, neither did we. But Exalead has solved a problem that may or may not exist by putting thumbnail previews of websites next to search results.

Overall, the search engine performs reasonably well. There's a nice "related term" feature that lets you narrow your search results. And you can search the full web or just blogs. But the way we see it, there's two problems:

The thumbnails are far too small to really tell you anything. If you're searching for a product, you might have enough info to determine if you're looking at a web store or review site. But you might not. And for more esoteric searches, good luck.
The site includes 2-3 sponsored results at the top of the page. That would be fine for text results, but with images, your browser window can easily show 3 sponsored items and just one genuine, unbiased (we hope) search result. If you have to scroll down to get to the good stuff, people are just going to choose a different search engine.

In other words, the pictures aren't big enough to be useful, and they may also be too big to provide you all the information you want at a glance. The simplest solution would probably be to use fewer paid links, or to make the images for sponsored results a bit smaller.

The search engine does let you turn off the image preview, but if you do that, there's really not much reason to use Exalead over competing products.

Exalead will demonstrate its search engine at the DEMO conference next week.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Tags: demo, exalead, images, search-engine, thumbnails

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

taybay said 10:45AM on 9-23-2007

There's a firefox extension that does this for google anyway.

Fred Thompson said 11:12AM on 9-23-2007

GooglePreview http://ackroyd.de/googlepreview/
Firefox and IE

Robt.Markowitz said 3:56PM on 9-23-2007

Page Bull has been out for some time and also shows the search results web pages

Mr.Kyle Sho said 11:01AM on 9-24-2007

hi brand

this is great information and very much useful for all the SEO expert

thanks a lot

trent said 3:15PM on 9-28-2007

Stumbled upon this website thumbnails site on StumbleUpon, Added thier thumbnails to my website and they were captured in just a few seconds! Very reliable and fast from what I can tell, http://thumbnailspro.com

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