Yesterday, I saw a blog post somewhere (sorry, I forget where, but probably either from Boing Boing or Jason Kottke) about Snap, a new search engine. (No link; we'll get to that later.) The unique and interesting thing about Snap is that it pushes some of the power to the browser. After entering your initial search terms and getting a list of results, you can refine your query by entering additional search terms, and through the power of Javascript, the list of results gets updated as you type.
I've never been a big fan of Javascript; my initial experiences were unfavorable (e.g. the energy you had to expend just to deal with differences in implementation between browsers), and the payoff was minimal (e.g. fiddly little UI tweaks that ran more to "look what I can do" than "really useful"). I'm starting to come around, though, thanks to useful browser-side scripting examples like TiddlyWiki and (I'm told) GMail. And Snap.
Except....
Cory Doctorow read far enough into Snap's website to discover that Snap has a "unforgivably stupid and evil linking policy". So no linking to it here. I'm feeling a little guilty about even describing Snap—not for legal reasons, but because bad publicity is still publicity.
Maybe they'll come around, and embrace openness in linking. Or maybe we'll just keep referencing Snap without linking, as a cautionary tale.
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