Visual search engines like Searchme, Viewzi and Cooliris are still far away from replacing general-purpose search engines like Google. Coverflows, thumbnail galleries and timelines are pretty to look at, and they often work well for image and video searches. But so far nothing beats the old list of 10 blue links when it comes to efficient web search. Page titles and text summaries with highlighted keywords are far better (general) indicators of relevance than small thumbnails. A combination of text and thumbnails works quite well, though. I'm very pleased with the GooglePreview addon for Firefox, and I encourage everyone to try it.
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