2 replies to this topic

[Tom Philo]

I was using the IE 6 fature of hitting the search button to bring up the search menu (where IE splits the screen with the search feature/box in a pane on the left in a frame) and happen to let it default to MSN doing a search.

The results came back as a list in the left pane, and thumbnails of the pages of the listed results in the right pane.

When did MSN start doing graphic thumbnails of web sites pages?

At the bottom on the left pane there is a checkbox that says Show Search Preview(right).

Is a handy feature that I found by accident.

You can certainly scan the images of the pages a lot faster than opening up each one individually. This method does put more emphasis on the initial appearance of the to get people to click on the site.

Tom

[qwerty]

I've been seeing it for a long time, but I never knew how to get it. I find it by looking at my referrer logs and opening the URL in my browser to see what the searcher saw, so I don't see the stuff in the left pane -- just the thumbnails.

I couldn't tell you exactly how long I've been seeing this, but it's definitely more than a year.

[Vrian Sinth]

It has been doing that for years. It will not show the thumbnail if you search directly from MSN, but if you search using the IE search feature it will show you the thumbnails every time.