When running a Google search, is it possible to send a parameter that customizes the results to include more detail than the default of 3 or 4 lines in the snippets it displays on its results page?
I tried to Google for how to do it, but the hits I got were all about how a site owner might customize what appears in a snippet when others search your site.
I’ve been playing an online trivia game in which it’s explicitly allowed to Google for answers, but speed counts. If I can’t spot the correct answer in any of the first few snippets returned by Google, someone else with superior Google-fu is likely to answer first and I lose that point.
Frequently, I can tell that the answer I’m looking for is probably just a few more words past the end of the snippet Google returned. If the snippets were just a tad longer I wouldn’t have to click on the result and waste valuable time waiting for that page to load and then skimming down the page looking for the correct answer.
If any other engine besides Google can do this with a parameterized search I’ll switch to using that one instead.
I don’t think you can get Google to return longer snippets against their will, but there are Chrome addons that give you in-page previews on the search results page, like this one:
Might make it SLIGHTLY faster.
For speed benefits, it might be easier to record a macro that automatically Googles the question as soon as it’s displayed.
Wouldn’t any addon that pre-fetches pages slow down the search overall before it shows me the results page with snippets?
Some years ago long before I started playing the trivia game I remember after an update Firefox had a new default configuration that automatically started to do pre-fetches and thumbnails of the pages in the results. I disabled it as annoying. The thumbnails were very hard to read.
Even if the page with the answer loads in negligible time, it would be painfully slow and cost way too much time trying to skim for the answer in the small preview thumbnails. Experience has shown that if I don’t see the answer right away in one of the top snippets, I’ve already lost the point to somebody else.
Already done. That’s why I mentioned I need to be able to use a parameter to tell the search engine I want longer snippets.
It depends on the plugin. That particular one looks like it lazy-loads half-page previews to the right of the search result, which is probably faster than opening a bunch of new tabs but slower than a purpose-built result parser.
I don’t know if it pre-fetches. It shouldn’t slow down loading the results page, I would think, because it probably loads the results first and then generates the previews afterward – but you can verify that for yourself.
You might as well make it go through each result page, download the HTML, and display the few sentences before and after the found phrase. If you skip images and the such, that should be pretty quick.
That’s why I mentioned I need to be able to use a parameter to tell the search engine I want longer snippets.