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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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]