Feeling the Snap? 30 Jan 2007

One of the main things people love about Snap is the large preview image it provides alongside each search result. This means that you can evaluate results without having to visit the sites they lead to - saving you the time and effort of having to pogo-stick back and forth between irrelevant sites and the search results page, before finding useful content. Great stuff!

...Snap Preview Anywhere however, is the work of the devil (OK, so it's probably not that bad, but it's still intensely annoying!). SPA is a free service that lets any site owner add Snap's previewing technology to their site. Once installed, every link reveals a small pop-up preview of its destination on mouseover. To see how this works, take a look at the example on the SPA site (rollover the "Try Snap Preview Anywhere here" link).

How can Snap search engine's previews succeed, while Snap Preview Anywhere's fail? Well, Snap search engine's previews are big, allowing you to read a fair amount of the content contained within the previewed page. The SPA previews however, are small, rendering almost all of the content contained within the previewed page illegible. (You can only really get a flavour of the overall page aesthetic). Worse still the SPA pop-up mechanism is sluggish and obscures text on the page that's currently in view.

Darren Barefoot adds more fuel to the fire:

"In evaluating these badboys, we can ask a very simple question: is the added value of previewing the destination page worth the distraction of the popup? I may be a curmudgeonly old computer user, but for me the answer is no. 90% of the time, I know where I'm going before I click a link...On Doodlebuy, for example, the Snap-enabled links read 'Click here to go to Amazon.com'. That pretty much makes the preview moot, doesn't it? For the other 10% of the time, Snap will only help if I recognize the destination site in the mini preview. The odds are that I won't, so it's not much help unless I'm trying to avoid sites featuring naked people (and who wants to do that?)."

Related: Definitely not feeling the Snap.