Name: McSearchPreview
Version: 1.6
Site: http://docs.g-blog.net/code/mozilla_extensions
What It Does: Add thumbnail images to search results
Reviewer: Brad Shimmin

McSearchPreview adds thumbnails to search listings. (Click on image to expand.)

They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Obviously whoever penned that phrase was familiar with Google -- after a while, the plain text links all begin to look like alike.

McSearchPreview adds thumbnail images for destination pages to search results from Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, AllTheWeb, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Simpy.com. I found this premise to be extremely liberating and efficient. I was able to more quickly assess the viability and applicability of search results.

But this efficiency does come at a price. There is an appreciable delay in loading search results. By choosing not to display Alexa.com thumbnails for sites without images, I was able to speed up my search results dramatically.

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The Options window gives full control of the extension, especially the different preview configurations. For example, I could choose to use thumbnails taken from Thumbshots.org or fill in missing thumbnails with images from Alexa.com. For the truly paranoid out there, McSearchPreview will run all thumbnail requests through Anonymization.net.

Book lovers will appreciate the way McSearchPreview not only shows the cover images for Amazon.com books, but the average reader rating and new/used practices as well. Another Amazon.com-centric goodie that comes with McSearchPreview is Watchcow.net, an RSS-based price tracker for Amazon.com products. In fact, the creator is an Amazon Affiliate, so whenever you link off to Amazon.com to buy a product via this extension, you'll be sending him a percentage of that sale. The author states that this approach saves him having to charge for McSearchPreview.

Strange financing aside, this is no fly-by-night extension. It's very solid, stable and, best of all, supported via a developer-driven message board.