One thing people really like about the Snap search engine is that it gives a large preview screen of every search result. The idea is that users can save time by seeing the site before they click to it. That can be an advantage when wading through increasingly sophisticated SEO and spoof sites that aren’t relevant to your search. Snap has 300 million stored site images, updated regularly, and adds new ones as unique searches are performed. The search engine is now serving up to 50,000 searches per day.
Last week they launched Snap Preview Anywhere, a free service that lets any site owner add previewing technology to their sites. When installed, every link on the site (internal links are optional) will show a preview of the linked site when a viewer hovers over the link. To see how it works, hover over the “Try Snap Preview Anywhere here” link near the top of this page. Snap Product Evangelist Jason Fields and Business Development executive Joseph Sarmiento gave me a demo of Snap Preview Anywhere at the Web 2.0 Summit last week.
The preview optionally includes a Snap search box, and large partners are eligible to negotiate a revenue share with Snap based on usage. For others, having the preview functionality will be incentive enough.
Someone has already created a wordpress plugin for the functionality as well, which makes installation easier.
Since launching a few days ago, Snap reports that 500 sites have integrated the functionality and 70,000 page previews have been created. Note related services Browster and Cooliris, which users can integrate into their browser to view page previews for certain links on any site.
Hey Eric, I have a high tolerance for blog spam on this site, but that’s just completely unrelated. Future links like that get deleted.
There are several free screenshot services which provide nice alternatives without the branding and searchbox added by snap. I recently compared some of them at http://www.spli...site_thumbnails
Michael-
Nice catch on Eric’s comment. As a blogger, I found both your response along with his very funny. Come on Eric! You have a Ph.D…. you could have at least included a comment that was relevant to the post.
I have tested the WordPress plugin for Snap and found it very easy to use. Congrats Snap on the nice size launch.
Great feature. But sheesh…they need to get rid of all the popup spoon feeding messages. Why not just have a google-like interface and on mouse-over show the msg preview? Or just anything not as cumbersome…
fascinating, given the choice between a) hosted services (andi links to a great roundup above), b) hosted and branded previews (same, but like snap they have a big ass ad on every single one, or c) a simple ajax preview script (as is used on many sites currently and does not rely on external hosting services, i’ve gotta say that C will win…once again, this is a feature, not a company – snap.com is interesting, but a whole entry about a feature? come on…
but HEY (arrington) here’s a relevant idea: if you’ve covered the company before, why not run a ‘feature update/release’ blog in parallel? eg the post links to the original post, but the authors are simply the founders of these assorted companies, and when they have new features they roll the change log into your ‘features updated/fixed’ blog thing…like update.techcrunch.com (not a main blog, just a way for those of us who actually do care about this kind of stuff to keep a separate unified rss for this…) – is that overkill? i’d use it (e.g. daily updates like ’snap adds thumbnail etc’ with a link right up top to the crunch posts about snap as well as a summary of whatever it is…***without wasting space** on your main blog…there are just so many other cool companies to write about (maybe)
Hi,
I have developed some thing similar before snap search engine went online , its called TextShot and can be seen here: http://www.deepy.com
The idea was to be able to Instantly preview a “Formatted text version” of the site in the results without having to open it , Instantly with just one click , and to be able to see where your searched keywords has appeared , by jumping to it automatically.
It also has an Ajax “As you type Keywords Suggester” , and also that was before Goggle introduced Google Suggests , we have , however , applied for Patents for both features since then.
You can play with the site or visit the Flash Tour: http://www.deep...m/content/tour/
Pretty cool little widget. Impressive adoption rate too. I like the idea of companies creating services that other site owners can implement, use and gain value out of like that.
Pretty Cool … I just wish it where a “little quicker / snappier.” (Given the technology involved, I understand the “lag.”)
Good luck
See it in action at Dexly.com. We were chosen to beta test Snap’s Preview Anywhere technology. It works wonderfully with our AJAX structure.
John Diep
A lovely plug-in, indeed! Could be a great way for webmasters to distinguish themselves from the competition and also to effectively add some nifty bells and whistles to their sites completely free of charge. As has already been pointed out, it may help prevent people from being referred to low-quality sites (though the beauty of design is in the eye of the beholder).
Makes me wonder, though – with all the free publicity that this tool will generate for Snap, how long until Google gets into offering image previews of search results as well? I thought I recalled Searchmash offering this feature at one point, but now I checked their site and I don’t see it any longer, so maybe I was just dreaming. Let’s just hope they don’t come up with a total overkill like Microsoft did with Ms Dewey.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find these preview windows annoying? I have the habit of moving my mouse around (and sometimes mindlessly highlighting things) as I read, and go nuts with these mini-popup windows.
Ian:
I admit it. It was wrong. I deceived the TechCrunch community. For that, I’m sorry. Mike rapped me on the hand like the good father of this community that he is.
We all have to learn from this experience and be the wiser bloggers for it.
Best wishes,
Eric
“Say No to Crack”-
I find them slightly disturbing as well, mostly due to fact that they appear at different points in the text if your cursor moves, and this one seems to flicker. I’m a compulsive text-highlighter myself.
Also, I haven’t looked into the implementation of these, but when people have both a browser plug-in or extension for hover previews and the site has a library for it, will two windows appear? Or are collisions resolved? Anyone have insight on this?
Hello,
I am excited and glad to see opinions coming from both sides. To answer the question about both plugins and the site code conflicting with each other, we are aware there may issues. This is something we are already looking at.
As of right now our code is totally independent and not aware of any user installed plugins so if there was a conflict, they both would probably display their own windows. I believe i saw this on a blog that already had the MyBlogLog ‘most popular’ link floating window.
Jason Fields
Product Evangelist, Emerging Technologies
http://www.Snap.com
Wasn’t there another service that offers a “live” preview of the site instead an image that may be several days (weeks?) old? This might be ok for sites that never change but pretty much useless if the site is dynamic. For one thing, you might be displaying an outdated image and sending the potential visitor away instead of the other way around (encouraging them to visit the site).
It is useful for news aggregation sites.
The release of the Google Web Toolkit earlier this year inspired me to create a proof-of-concept kinda application which lets you preview any link on your web site by simply tagging it. Today I read on Techcrunch that a company called snap.com released a cool product called “Snap Anywhere” which is quite similar to what had in mind. Read up on it here: http://dlinsin....great-idea.html
Direct link to the WordPress plugin
Michael, I hope you did mind me posting the link above. The link you posted in the main post leads to WLTC’s forum post I made. Just thought users would prefer a direct link to the main site as opposed to taking a detour.
We just added it, and it works great
However, there should be more color-customization options.
One a white background like techcrunch, it blends in well and looks attractive – but on our twilight-sky colored background, it appears odd.
Hello Mr. Arrington,
As posted above, I too found that the “Snap Preview Anywhere” previewed something totally different than the actual web page. Hence, it isn’t too much of a preview. Hence, if it doesn’t serve to preview, then, the purpose of this gizmo is … ?
Are there any actual (WEB-COMPLIANT) web pages using this gizmo that acutally provides a useful service to the web page viewer? I’d be interested in reviewing them.
Snap commented out the DOCTYPE on their web page. I note here that many older javascript applications fail in the presence of a DOCTYPE, resulting in INVALID WEB PAGES. Is this the case with Snap?
I am not sure what benefit this gizmo provided me or is supposed to provide me, as a viewer of Security’s web page (which sports 1 error and 176 warnings) !?! Perhaps someone can explain (other than, “it’s cool”).
Man hour dollar-wise, how much did it take to implement this gizmo and what is its expected ROI?
The link to your blog, here, on CSS DRIVE states “One thing people really like about the Snap search engine is that it gives a large preview screen of every search result”
So, where is this LARGE PREVIEW SCREEN? What is the code behind it?
Mr. David Linsin’s version is of greater interest to me then Snaps and I’ve just downloaded his work to have a look-see. Perhaps I can find a more appropriate use for this application for my web site viewers. I’ll first need to test its validity, keeping in line with good design practices.
Kind regards,
Al Toman
This is a great little plug in. What would be nice is if it gave the owners of the site being previewed a way to point it to a specific page and/or image. While a 218×140 screenshot of a website is nice, those pixels could definately be better utilized. Just a thought.
I honestly see this as a kind of dupe to pageviews and advertisers. I wrote about this topic briefly, and I am still awaiting a final answer on how analytics programs count these “hits” from a preview script. One thing to note also is that snap is amassing these screen captures to better the community who can have access to the database of screens in the future. This script is therefore a help to your surfers, but also helping snap (nothing wrong with that though).
I would just like to know how these javascript page calls are reflected – is it a real pageview?
Eric, from what I have observed so far, most previews are real.
You can take a look at quite a few snap sites, including mine (when you click my name here).
The previews are freshly generated for new pages. One thing that I did notice is that if that page changes for some reason (e.g. the homepage of a blog) the old preview is still displayed.
So there are limitations unless and until Snap decides to expire thumbnails or users are allowed to instruct the thumbnail to be updated (as with Alexa)
If you are using WordPress, I hope you find my WordPress plugin useful
Hey this is a great tool to let user know what the next link has for them. But yah, as Ajay says there are limitation if a page changes quite often. But thats always been there for Search Engines. Just that the engines keep crawling and updating the site formation and i hope SPA(Site Preview Anywhere) does the same in a regular basis.
I tried flicking the download page for SPA but could not (JYI). This may not be the app area to point out Flick’s flaws(soory for that) but may be you guys can point them out with the problem.
hm… nice, but I will stick with http://websnapr.com/ for now because it is 100 times better.
@Abhishek,
What is Flick?
@Sandro, Websnapr looks good. Will play around with this as well. Thanks.
This is cool but if one really likes relevant results, then SearchMash/ MashProxy built by Pete Warden is very very neat. It has a great Firefox extension to preview Google results and eliminating bad links. Check out the demo at http://mashproxy.com/
Snap is my favorite search engine, and I am glad to see them creating a useful plugin that will help them gain the exposure they deserve.
Thanks for the mention Mrinal. I’m fond of Snap and Ask’s preview images, but I wanted a live preview that’s up to date, and you can start navigating on.
You can add MashProxy previews to any site for free already, no work required, and no pesky popups, just a split-screen view.
Wow. This is a pretty sweet offer from Snap. How do they profit from this?
Ajay. its not flick its fleck..http://www.fleck.com. Its a cool tool. Sorry for the spelling mistake.
Hello TechCrunchers,
As of yesterday evening Snap published some improvements to our Snap Preview Anywhere product that I wanted to share with you all… These are all automatically available to anyone using the snippet of javascript without any updating… Just reload your page and you should be good!
• We increased the dimensions/size of the sites preview images by about 10-12%, this allows a bit more to be previewed as well as a much more detail/clarity in the content and text on the site (improving a users judgment on clicking to the site being linked). We saw some comments from users that the size was an issue, but we did not want to take over ones screen real estate, so we looked at a number of image sizes before we made a decision.
• We implemented a ‘Smart’ image crawler which, once a user signs up, looks at the links on the page(s) of the site using Snap Preview Anywhere, if we do not have an image for a link, we automatically capture it. SO… no more manually hovering over links to add them to the image queue!
Note: In order to guarantee the images are properly captured, make sure the URL that you enter upon sign is the page where the javascript code is located. ON a couple of occasions people have signed up with one URL and pasted the code in another, this does not work 100% of the time.
• We added more control over which links will or will not exhibit the Snap Preview behavior. Just take a look at our FAQ and you will be able to grab any of the CSS code tweaks neeeded.
We are constantly reading feedback, posts on blogs, comments, and just keeping our eyes and ears open to the public on how we can improve the product… SO keep your thoughts coming!
Thanks again for your support!
Jason Fields
Product Evangelist, Emerging Technologies
http://www.Snap.com
How i can integrate screenshots to my php script?
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Pues a mi no me funciona. No sé qué pasará con esto.
Mi url es http://www.gran...ta.blogpost.com
A ver, me gusta la funcionalidad de este servicio pero no quiero tratarme con Snap. Hay otra version que funcione solo?
Sorry to be so negative, but I absolutely HATE this. The previews are too small to be any use to me – I can’t see what the *words* say, so there is no way to tell from the preview whether or not the target site matches what I’m looking for.
Secondly, people use them indescriminately all over their sites: I can just about comprehend that for search results, they might have a use, but for general linking from blog posts, they’re pointless: the thing that’s making me click your link *isn’t* the preview of the site, it’s what *you* have said about the site.
And finally, the loading time. It is almost without exception quicker to take a brief look at the target site than to wait for Snap to load the preview.
I’m actually stopping visiting several blogs where I used to be a regular because I find these previews so disruptive.
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Pretty much you are offering free advertising to Snap because people will use Snap’s integrated search bar in the preview. Unlike with Google , you don’t get any of the profit from these searchs and instead you only get a free preview feature which you could manually implant yourself for the sites you want viewers to see.
It completely sucks.. Test it in several browsers.. and you will see. It also influences your template, site. I am sorry to say.
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Nice tip… But it slows down your page upload speeds!!
Cheers!!
Jason S
I Blog at : http://jsbi.blogspot.com
Thank you for this article about Snap…I have had a few hits from it, and I was curious as to what it is, and now I know! Thanks once again!
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L’information interessante que vous avez! I’am allant revenir bientot.
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