Snap or Google?

Hmmmmm ...... another Search Engine - SNAP!! Pretty interesting that it pulls out a picture, but it sorta lags a bit ... hmm perhaps if our bandwidth improves with speed and capacity, SNAP may be a pretty cool tool to use for Searches!

Google may be the most popular search engine to date but there are plenty of alternative search engines looking to grab a piece of the action – and we're not just referring to Yahoo! Search or MSN Search.

Here's a look at some of the more interesting ones out there.

If you ever wanted to have a more visually stimulating web browsing experience, Snap gives you exactly that.

What is interesting about Snap as an alternative to Google is the way Snap takes a different approach to searching the Web.

Instead of giving you back a set of plain old text search results, it gives you an actual preview of the webpage you are about to visit.

Search results are displayed on the left side of the page, while the other side provides a visual preview of the website (which you can choose to view in small, medium or large).

This visual display of images along with text is a refreshing change to looking at wordy description of websites on other search engines. The beauty of it is that you get to judge whether the search result is relevant just by previewing it.

Another cool feature of Snap is that it actively anticipates your search. From the moment you start typing in the search box, Snap will begin to actively anticipate you want to search for, offering popular terms, synonyms along with suggestions.

Scrolling through pictures: You can easily scroll through pictures while previewing them with Snap’s new image search function.

Snap also allows users to interact with a previewed website without having to leave the search engine and search results behind. For example, you can preview a travel website, enter your personal details, pick a destination and choose a flight time all while still having access to your results list.

However, the drawback to this is you have to be using Internet Explorer in order to benefit from this feature. Also, users are required to perform an additional step by downloading an Active-X preview control to make direct interactivity active by default in Snap.

Another thing we liked about Snap is its newly added Image search function. While most of us are all familiar with other image search engines like Google Image Search, Snap takes a rather unique approach.

Snap's image search looks very much like an image-browsing program. Images found are presented in the form of thumbnails on the left with a larger version of the picture is shown on the right.

The cool thing about this feature is the seamless transition of images as users browse through images. Still, the best thing about it is that it intelligently checks the previewed images and automatically discards images with broken links.

In short, Snap is a nice and simple search engine with a good layout that delivers search results clearly.

Snap's visually stimulating site preview feature offers something fresh that clearly stands out among the masses of text based search engines on the web.

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[tags : delephant fun stuff]