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› December 10, 2002

Google Viewer

  • Reported by Nate

Via Archipelago: An interesting experiment over at Google Labs: Google Viewer makes a scrolling slideshow of your search results. Strangely, it seems to attempt rendering each search result in it's own way (rather than through an iframe or something), I'm guessing this is what's happening because it seems to be stripping out external stylesheet data. Interestingly Andy developed something similar a while back that uses dual floating windows.

Comments

1. December 10, 2002 11:31 PM

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Sanjay Posted…

I think the viewer is using the Google cached versions of the pages and often the cached pages may not link correctly to various resources like stylesheets and images so they appear as if they are stripped of them.

2. December 11, 2002 01:09 AM

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Nate Posted…

Sanjay, for a good hour or so I was completely convinced it was the chache as you suggested... then I remembered that the chached version of this site shows up with it’s stylesheets. So after more investigation here’s what I’ve figured out:
The URL shown for this site in “google viewer” = http://216.239.33.136/cgi-bin/gvps.cgi?http://www.web-graphics.com/
This is not the same as the cached version, and if you view the source of that page, you’ll see an “X” is added within the stylesheet reference between the @ and “import”... this breaks the link to my external stylesheet. I wonder why that happens? Is it intentional, or for some other purpose? I’m not too worried about it, this site is intended to be read that way under some circumstances... but this reminds me, I must add those “skip to” links before the blogroll, yikes.

3. December 13, 2002 07:26 PM

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Manuel Razzari Posted…

An usability paradox, perhaps? I mean that, when I query google, I get such good results that I actually want to *read* the first five of them, instead of being slideshowed 50 pages until I snap the right one. I loved this thing, and can't wait until I actually need it (i.e.,to scan for I a subject I don't quite know) so I can really test it.