As I may have mentioned before, I’m your typical lazy Google-only kind of web searcher, but I always have my eye out for the search engine that might really and truly make me switch (or at least search in more than one spot). Snap could be that search engine.

I first spied Snap a couple of months ago - I noticed while cruising through a blog (that I can’t remember any more) that when I rolled over their links to other websites, a preview bubble of the site showed up. I thought this was super cool since it enabled me to get the gist of the sites they were referring to without having to navigate away from the blog. This preview bubble is the Snap Preview Anywhere widget - Snap makes it pretty easy to add this widget to your blog’s code (Laurie just added it to ours - yeah!), so I can see this rapidly becoming a standard include on many websites.

However, Snap isn’t just a preview window into others’ websites, as I hinted at earlier, it’s also a search engine. When you search in Snap, your search results are returned in 2 panes. On the left side is your standard list of site returns, on the right side is a preview of the first site on the list. If you scroll down through the list of returns, either using the up/down arrows, or with your mouse’s scroll ball, the preview window shows a look into each successive site. I really like having this added visual component of searching - it helps me filter through the types of sites returned quickly (is this one just giving opinions about electric mowers?, selling electric mowers?, etc…) to get to what I’m actually looking for.

Give Snap a try and play with some of their fun features like the weather search, the site rating system, and the adult filter system under “settings.” The mix of images and a list in a non-cluttered format might just make you expand your search repertoire too!