I originally thought this wasn’t going to be much more than a novelty, but it’s actually rather neat. Spacetime http://search.spacetime.com/ allows you to search and get your results as Web pages. It’s in beta.

Do a search (it defaults to Google but you can search other resources like Wikipedia, About.com, and Amazon) and Spacetime will think about it for a few minutes and the present your results to you as a series of Web pages through which you can browse. A plugin is not required; the site is Flash-based. (Because of that it’s a little slow to load, but not to the point that it’s unusable.) You can see the screenshot below to see how it looks.

(What happens when there’s no page preview available? You get a blue screen with the words “NO PREVIEW”. I only saw that once.)

There’s a bar at the bottom of the page that allows you to move through the results, but you can also paginate through the results by clicking on a page. Another click and a new page opens with a direct link to the site.

The strength of a search like this is obviously that you can review a lot of pages at once and you can also get a good sense of which sites are legit and which aren’t. (It’s not foolproof, of course…) The pages are large enough that you can actually read a lot of them without having to jump to the actual site itself. The downside of it is that the Web page previews look like, well, WEB PAGES; I kept trying to interact with them like Web pages even though I knew rationally they were just images.

I think my favorite use for this site wasn’t even the Google search; it was the Wikipedia search. Searching for a general topic and getting all the pages in one place gave me a way to flip through them quickly and get an idea of the kinds of topics that were relevant to the general search. I could then refine my wikipedia search and run another one, etc etc. Very handy.