If you do much web surfing, you’ve probably seen these “Snap shots” things that pop up when you mouseover a link on an uglified blog. Here’s a screen cap so you know what I’m talking about:

Exactly what useful information does that popup provide? Well, I guess it tells you whether or not the page is 404′d. Did you really need to know that? Was it worth the annoying spammy popup? No? Oh well.

So what’s the real purpose of the “Snap shots” popup? To hawk their lame Google-ripoff browser, of course. It’s main appeal is supposed to be that it generates large previews for each link in your search. But these seem to load slower than the page itself. This feature (the previews, not the slow load times) might have been kind of handy in the days before tabbed browsing, but, right now, what’s the point? Not that it really works anyway — most of the time you see something like this:

But wait, there’s more! Snap has features those other search engines don’t. It says so right on their “Why Snap is Better” page. One of the super-useful features listed on that page is the “SNAP Map,” pictured here:

Oh wait… that’s just a Google Map. But the “find business” and “get directions” search buttons must use that innovative Snap engine, right? Nope, those are external links to Insider Pages and Google Maps. So what makes it a “SNAP Map”? I guess all web content’s fair game — you can just stick it in a frame and brand it as part of your site.

On an unrelated note, what you think of my new “HANK News” feature?

Bottom line: Snap sucks. Disable their popups, don’t waste time with their terrible search engine, and, for the sake of websurfers everywhere, please don’t deface your site with their hideous, annoying mouseover popups.

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