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by Cheah Chu Yeow.
Original Post: McSearchPreview - a better GooglePreview?
Feed Title: redemption in a blog
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Feed Description: ramblings of a misfit - web development, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, CSS, programming
Carlo Zottmann wrote me about 2 weeks back to let me know about his McSearchPreview extension for Firefox. He wrote his first Firefox extension after using the GooglePreview extension (which I wrote about) and discovering that it lacked similar capabilities for other search engines that he uses. Attending a need is indeed excellent inspiration.
McSearchPreview adds preview thumbnails to search results for Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9 and AllTheWeb. Unlike GooglePreview, the thumbnails are retrieved from Alexa (by default - Thumbshots can also be used as an alternative). This means a larger number of results will have preview images, since Thumbshots only has thumbnail images of pages that are in DMOZ (in which very few pages would be listed).
McSearchPreview also adds an "Open in new window link" at the end of each search result - the actual usefulness of this feature is a little arguable since we are using a browser with tab browsing, after all. It also adds a "Site Info" link that takes you to the Alexa page for the search result's domain. It seems like an Amazon affiliate link but I'm not exactly sure if the author gets any benefit from it. Well, I'm fine with letting Carlo make a little profit from his neat extension, if any, but it would have been nice if he'd explained why there's (what appears to be) Amazon affiliate code in the "Site Info" links. Incidentally, the author of GooglePreview has removed Amazon affiliate code from version 0.3 of the extension.
Anyway, this is a really nice extension and I'm using it in place of GooglePreview at the moment (more pretty thumbnails!). Thanks Carlo!
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