Nowadays there are a ton of tools on offer, all of which promise to revolutionize the search experience, there are tools for all the big search engines and many of the smaller ones as well. My own needs are much simpler, I don’t require any toolbar and don’t need local search as over the years I’ve learned practises that mean I know where any given file is, or at least where I need to look for it, I also don’t require a toolbar to access search engine functionality, I’m quite happy with the advanced search screen at Google and it serves me just fine.
However, sometimes you find something that enhances the experience in a way that is actually beneficial rather then just offering an alternative. I found such an enhancement today. It’s called Bettersearch and it is a Firefox extension that doesn’t provide an alternative interface to the search engines, it just enhances the standard interface. It does this by inserting a thumbnail image of the sites listed in the search results on the search page, allowing you to get a rough idea if the site actually matches your terms and is likely to be helpful or if it is just a saved page of search engine results from someone trying to game the search engines for advertising dollars, (something I’m seeing allot of nowadays). The extension does other things as well, but that one alone was reason enough to try it. The tool works with Google, Yahoo, MSN and more. Well worth the 20 seconds or so that it takes to download and install. Try it for yourself and see if I’m not right.
