For those of you unfamiliar with what Snap or Snap-shots is, it’s a bit of javascript that you can place above the closing </body> tag which allows your visitors to see a visual preview of a site that a link is linking to when they hover over said link. Additionally, you can go to the Snap website and perform a classic, enhanced, or image search. Classic being what you think a classic search would look like, aesthetically like Google, Yahoo, or MSN serps, enhanced allows you to search visually which essentially converts the serps into website snapshots, and the image search is exactly what it sounds like.

Snap is brought to us by Bill Gross of Idealab in Pasadena, California which has been creating technology companies since 1996. Bill is responsible for companies such as City Search, Commission Junction, Overture (GoTo.com), and Picassa. With Snap they’re saying, ” those of us at Snap have come here to build the next great search engine.” Quite a claim but more power to them. Personally I feel that the Snap-shot javascript functionality is neat but that’s pretty much where it’s usefulness seems to end. On the search side, searching visually via website snapshots is not something that is useful. A website displays a graphic arrangement of imagery and text which can be read and digested only at it’s proper scale. This formatted means of communication gets nullified when you present a small snapshot of the displayed information. A small visual representation of a website doesn’t really tell me anything nor does it assist in my search. It’s an interesting idea but not really helpful.

You can view the javascript in action over at ping-o-matic’s blog.

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