SearchPreview

About this Add-on

The main feature of SearchPreview (previously known as GooglePreview) is to enhance your search results pages. It inserts site preview images (thumbnails), popularity ranks (Google™ only) and sponsored links (where available and labeled "SearchPreview Sponsored Link") into Google™, DuckDuckGo™, Yahoo™ and Bing™ searches. Each feature can be individually disabled/enabled in the SearchPreview preferences area. The SearchPreview thumbnail system currently consists of 10 servers and generates over 15 TB of traffic per month.

Version Information

Version 8.11 Released June 5, 2017 72.1 KiB Works with Firefox 17.0 and later

Source code released under Custom License
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SearchPreview Privacy Policy

What are SearchPreview Sponsored Links?

For some search terms, SearchPreview will insert sponsored links into the Google search results (labeled as 'SearchPreview Sponsored Links'). For this feature SearchPreview connects to the server ads.searchpreview.de or adsde.searchpreview.de or adsint.searchpreview.de (depending on your location), the chosen server will try and send back sponsored links that fit with the search term.

Why Sponsored Links?

9 dedicated servers using up over 15TB of monthly traffic cost real money, administration and development also cost real money. The sponsored links will hopefully help cover the costs.

What data is sent to a SearchPreview server when a preview image is requested?

The preview images are requested via the HTTP protocol, this request will contain the following information:

The request for the preview image (For example http://f.searchpreview.de/preview?s=www.mozilla.com)
Your IP (for example 123.123.12.1)
The referrer (the site the image was embedded in, for example http://www.google.de/search?q=firefox)
The user agent (a string identifying the browser you are using, for example Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6)

Every HTTP request contains the above data, see the RFC 2616 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html) for a detailed description of the protocol details.

Do the SearchPreview servers log all this data?

No, the SearchPreview web servers are configured to log only date, request, http status code and the time in milliseconds needed to process the request. This is an example log entry for the above request:

[12/Aug/2007:13:09:15 +0200] GET /preview?s=http://www.mozilla.com HTTP/1.1 200 1

Your IP, the referrer and user agent are not stored.

Why is the request saved in the log files?

This information is needed for the SearchPreview crawlers that crawl the web and create the preview images.

What happens with the log files?

The log files are processed automatically by the crawlers and are deleted after 10 days.

Do you sell data or let others process the data?

No.

Who provides the site popularity ranks?

The site popularity ranks are provided by Alexa Internet Inc., an amazon.com company. To receive the site popularity ranks of the sites in the search results page SearchPreview executes a HTTP request to widgets.alexa.com. This request contains the referer and the URLs of the sites in the search results page. The response contains the rank values for the search results. You can disable the site popularity rank feature in the SearchPreview options, in this case no data is sent to / requested from the Alexa server.

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SearchPreview 8.11 Requires Restart

by Edward Ackroyd

Meet the Developer: Edward Ackroyd

About this Add-on

Version Information

Version 8.11 Released June 5, 2017 72.1 KiB Works with Firefox 17.0 and later

Add-ons

Welcome to Firefox Add-ons.

On the go?

SearchPreview 8.11 Requires Restart

by Edward Ackroyd

Meet the Developer: Edward Ackroyd

About this Add-on

Version Information

Version 8.11 Released June 5, 2017 72.1 KiB Works with Firefox 17.0 and later

Privacy Policy

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