Look before you click
- — 13 December, 2004 07:18
Like several other Internet Explorer toolbars, the Viewpoint bar is a plug-in that helps you quickly search for items on the Web using Yahoo as a search engine.
Viewpoint adds a visual element to the search results, letting you see a thumbnail photo of a Web site in a horizontal scrolling window. When you roll your mouse over the thumbnail preview, the window gets slightly larger so you can see more. This lets you decide whether to continue to the site or go to the next search result. The toolbar also takes your favourites file and creates a visual representation of all your bookmarks. The toolbar also includes a pop-up blocker.
Sometimes reading descriptions of your search results isn't enough, sometimes you want to see what the site looks like before you go there. In that respect, the Viewpoint Toolbar succeeds in saving you from wasted clicks.
Our favourite part of this toolbar was the visual bookmark feature, which lets you refresh the page and see if there is any new content. If you scan a bunch of Web sites daily, setting it up so you can scan all of the sites at once (at a quick glance) is pretty valuable. Geared towards broadband users, this free toolbar requires about 20MB of hard disk space.
