'Web’s Biggest' Search Engine Takes Pictures of 40 Million Websites
 

March 4, 2005 -- The Web’s Biggest (www.websbiggest.com) search engine now enhances their search results with pictures of more than 40 million websites. The pictures appear whenever users pass their mouse over an icon beside a website’s URL, letting users quickly and easily preview each site.

According to a study by VeriTest, website thumbnails reduce the number of clicks required to find relevant websites by 50-70 percent.

Web’s Biggest also uses information gathered by their web crawler to summarize website content. Users can then search those website summaries as a superior way to find the top websites on a particular topic, rather than just pages which contain the search words.

Searchers can even change the descriptions of familiar websites. Since search results are based in part on website descriptions, this lets individual searchers change everyone’s search results.

The search engine stores all past descriptions of websites in a database so other users can undo or correct descriptions. This makes Web’s Biggest the world’s biggest “wiki�. Wiki is software that allows users to collectively author web documents.

“Having hundreds of thousands of editors, millions of website descriptions, and tens of millions of pictures is what makes Web’s Biggest unique,� says company spokesperson Paul Aunger.

Web’s Biggest has licensed the entire Whois database of more than 40 million domain names, enabling them to search almost every website in the world. Other search engines rely on hyperlinks and manual submissions to find websites. In a recent study done by the company, other search engines missed a third to more than half the websites in Web’s Biggest search results.

The Web’s Biggest (www.websbiggest.com) search engine lets users sort their search results so the most popular websites display first. Search results also include the Web’s Biggest “Popularity Rank,� ranking popular websites based on the number of visitors they receive from all sources.

The popularity rank comes from monitoring the web surfing habits of millions of people, with the number of visits each website receives counted and compared to all others.

Most search engines rank search results by the number of hyperlinks pointing to a website. “Unlike hyperlinks, website traffic tells you how popular a website really is,� says Aunger.

Thats pretty cool except for its constant need to be bookmarked even when it already is, also the thing were you put your mouse over to see the pic, that area is way to small and hard to get your mouse on.

Pretty useless gimmick.
Websites are (or should be) about content, not looks.

All it does effectively is increase the load on the websites it crawls.

Well sometimes if your looking for some real info you want a site that looks good and easy to read

Pretty useless gimmick ... that seems to have been working pretty good for Alexa for years ;)