With Google dominating the US search industry popularity contest, it’s easy to forget about lesser-known search tools and enhancements.  For example, here are a few that regularly make my life easier and my search experience more useful:

Google Preview, despite its unilateral name, works for both Google and Yahoo search results. This little plugin inserts a thumbnail screenshot image of the search result page, making the results list dramatically easier and faster to scan. Here’s how it looks in Google:

It also adds in a “popularity rank” bar, which draws on Alexa ranking data. I largely ignore these rankings, and they can be turned off entirely in the Google Preview preferences.

Here’s the link: Google Preview Plugin for Firefox

If you’re like me and often search for more obscure topics, you’ll typically dig past the first page of search results. In this circumstance it can be a pain to see only 10 results per page, but you can change this number in Google’s preferences. H