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
