Snap & Cooliris Web Site Preview Tools

By Loren Baker, Editor | January 10, 2007

Ken Yarmosh compares web preview tools Snap & Cooliris, both let you see the snapshot of the site you may visit before clicking on a link, but one is server based and the other a browser extension.

Ask.com uses a similar technique with their Ask.com binoculars which lets a user preview the pages listed in search results without clicking over. Snap is also a search engine but has exported out their technology to publishers, especially bloggers, who want to use the preview tools on their sites. By doing so, Snap (formerly an NBC owned search directory) has virally rebuilt their brand amongst bloggers & blog readers.

While Snap represents more of a server-side architecture, Cooliris is a browser extension/add-on that powers a similar feature. In this case, the user (client-side) has more control - and Cooliris also doesn’t load for every single external link, you need to hover over a link and then click the blue box next to it to show the preview. Cooliris will then load a full screen of the actual web page.

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