Why didn’t Google Think Of This … a Cool Search with Preview

Yes, Google has got the most popular search engine on the planet, and yes it has quite a few useful features. For me though, it does lack one important feature, and that is the ability to visually preview a site before actually clicking to enter. A thumbnail preview if you like. When compiling a design article, I quite often have hundreds of time-consuming tabs open with the potential and hope of finding a good resource and life would be so much easier if I could have had a preview beforehand. I have tried some Firefox extensions, some web apps and even some desktop applications that have given me a thumbnail of each site, I was more often than not disappointed, though. The thumbs would be either of a low resolution or whenever I clicked to enter a thumbnail preview, the page content would be completely different to the actual preview image.

This brings me to the reason why I am writing this post. I found such a search engine, with not only thumbnail preview, but REAL-TIME thumbnail preview. Which means when you enter your search term, the images it delivers are real-time snapshots of the actual site you plan to visit. Cool, just what I needed. Oh, by the way, it is called Murgurdy Search. When I first found Murgurdy Search, a few months ago, it was by invite only, so I tried, and loved it. It is now open to everyone, so I thought I would share this great app with everyone.

The Murgurdy Search Engine

Mugurdy is a rich visual search engine that delivers relevant, live results faster to every kind of Internet user. The site lets visitors browse arrays of Web pages – or the images of those Web pages – before clicking through to a selected site. With Mugurdy you can ‘visit’ 12 actual pages or more of the Web in the time it takes to read one page of Google’s results.

Murgurdy Search Results for “News”

Murgurdy Search with clicked High-Res Preview

Why would you want to use Mugurdy?

Traditional Search Engines such as Google have ‘cached’, or saved results which may be several days or weeks old. Mugurdy’s web views are live. So for example a search for ‘news’ will show live the websites of news sources and their current images and content rather than a text list of news sources days or weeks old – and then not their actual content (like newspaper front pages), but descriptions of them.