check this site http://www.searchshots.com/
They show a screen shot for each site in their directory.
I'm not sure if this has been done manually or automaticlly.
Its gonna be nice if someone make a plug-in for doing this.

Pretty nice...looks like it is "automatic" or at least "updated" on a regular basis...I highly doubt that the screenshots are parsed dynamically as you go through the directory. But as the "About" pages in that site states, they basically parse screenshots regularly and then upload them into their MySQL database.

In terms of Links SQL being able to do this...it wouldn't be hard to store screenshots...the challenge will be identifying the technology to parse updated screenshots.

In order to do this type of Mod, my thinking is that you would definitely need a dedicated server to handle the bandwidth and data storage.

Regards,

Eliot Lee

yes, it would be nice if someone made a plug-in for this.

Estimated cost?? Not in my budget.

These are not just screen shots. A simple GIF screen shot can be piped through one of the graphic manipulations programs, and a screen "shot" created, then resized. But they have animations and flash running, and that means getting cooperation from the web-page owners, most likely.

The backend is ODP, which can be parsed into links as it is.

This sort of site would become out of date quickly. Every time your home page changed, the image would have to change as well. You wouldn't want to do that.

It then goes back to the "logo" image. Getting a website to submit an image of their site for use.

I could see doing this on a niche/targeted scale, but to try to do it to ODP, with 1.3 million images stored, I'll bet most of the images are out of date.

Figure out your bandwidth costs even for automatically visiting each site once a week (if you could!) and generating a new image. Your bandwidth alone would be phenomenal, not to mention the back-end CPU needed to process the graphics for each site, then store it in a database.

It's cute, but not something I'd want to spend time developing at this point.

PUGDOG® Enterprises, Inc.
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I agree that doing something exactly like this will be costly. However, we can use the idea at least. For example, we can run the script that takes the screenshots every week or month. And make it load the most popular ten or hundred sites in each category.

That is an interesting concept.

It looks like only paid advertisers get Flash ads, the rest are just plain .gifs of the homepage. I was wondering why 'Charlies Angels' would show up in the "Illustration" category, and then I saw it pop up in other categories as well.

I don't think it's practical for a large database, but for one less than 5000 links it might be OK. Definitely high-bandwidth from the users point of view.

Bryan

It's a great idea. I particularly liked the '404' screenshots ("The page cannot be displayed").