November 29, 2006
Cooliris Preview: Just Too Cool
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I came across a browser plugin today called cooliris. (thanks lifehacker). It shows a preview of pages in search engine results pages, e.g., on Google or Yahoo. It provides very similar functionality to what they’ve done on Ask.com.
This is the sort of thing that you have to see. So I made a video…(I do apologize for the voice, I’ve got a bad cold.)
Click to see video:
If you can’t see the video, here’s a screenshot:
Nice, huh?
My initial concern was that they were forcing clicks when hovering over ads which would have been a complete disaster. I did in fact do some testing with a packet sniffer (**cough**dork**) and couldn’t find any google adword urls that were getting accessed. So good job there, they’re smart enough to pull out the destination url and just use that to get the preview. It turns out that this may actually save advertisers some dough if enough people are previewing before clicking.
I do wish I could turn it on and off, but it seems to just be on all the time. So I may need to just install it on Firefox, my secondary browser for when I really want it. It may become annoying. We’ll see.
Check it out: Cooliris
That is pretty cool. When I installed it it gave me some instructions on how to turn it on and off. I use firefox. Which is perfect because I can see me using it on certain occassion a lot, but not in others. Great tool. The other questions that I have - is how are they going to monetize this program? It does not seem to be an open source application but a company. Either way great find!
It seems that the Firefox version is more advanced in it’s development and features.
>> monetize
I was thinking the exact same thing. I’m picturing ads in the preview window.
downloaded it too. looks like fun and a great tool. thanks for the catch. i’ll report back if I can find a “new” use for it that can be monetized. use it for blog preview of a category listing…? not sure there is any money in it, but would sure help the blog search process.
scott, it also works on any website not just on google. the little blue box shows up and the preview screen pops up. that is really a help as you can preview blog entries or any type of link. really helpful.
[...] Scott Jangro Finds Cool New Tool: CoolIris.com November 30th, 2006 I downloaded this really cool tool that works great with Forefox on a recommendation on Scott Jangro’s blog. When you hover over a search link, a site text link or a banner a little blue box shows up and you can preview the site. Speeds up your surfing and your blog reviews in particular, no clicking in and clicking out. Just preview and decide to click in or not. Check out the review and Scott’s movie. “Cooliris Preview: Just Too Cool [...]
>> works on any website
Yeah, I think the firefox version does much more than the Safari version. I did notice today that it was giving me link previews in Ebay. Given that I cannot turn it on and off in Safari, I think that would drive me nuts if it were giving me a preview on every link. This plugin highlights the fact that I always hover over links before clicking to look in the status bar to see where it’s going.
>> can be monetized
I (and I think Freddy) was wondering how Cooliris is going to make money off this. But I like the way you think Durk.
I have just noticed at Revenews they are using this thing called SNAP wich is quite similar to Cooliris. It is a preview tool that webmasters put on their sites. Interesting.
I saw that Fernando. I wonder the same thing about that. It gives previews of ads. Is it causing a click?
The SNAP Plug in does not trigger a click from the client side. It probably does from the snap.com server. I would think that their script that pulls the content from the destination to the snap.com server is identifiable like a Search Engine Spider that PPC Services can exclude Clicks triggered by it.
Snap is doing a Get Request for an Image on the SNAP.com server and passes the Ad URL along as parameter
GET 200 image/jpeg
http://spa.snap.com/preview/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fads.revenews.com%2Fadclick.php%3Fbannerid...
The Cooliris Tool for IE under Windows on the other hand triggered a click to get the preview. The HTTP Requests for clicking the Ad directly and using Cooliris to just hover over it are virtually the same. Both triggered a 302 redirect (I tested AdWords Ads in the Google Serps).
So I would be careful with this tool. It might cause problems. It does not work with AdSense Ads that’s good so you avoid getting your account banned for “clicking” your own Ads.
Scott, how does it look like in FireFox or on the Mac?
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