The Google Viewer seems to have disappeared from Google’s site. The only traces of it is an about page, a page that was used while the Google Viewer loaded the visual display, and an error page:
www.google.com/googleviewer/about.html
www.google.com/googleviewer/loading.html
www.google.com/googleviewer/nonhtml.html
The About page is actually quite a nice historical document fo what the Google Viewer once was.
It must have been gone for quite some time now, and the only reason I caught eye of it was the fact that people have been searching for it and ended up on this very page.
I can’t really blame Google for taking it down. It was a funny tool to use, but not of much use. Besides, it was ad-free.
Original article:
February 20, 2002 – Did you try out the Google Viewer yet? It attempts to display the pages found as a result of your Google search as a continuous scrolling slide show. You can view your search results without using your keyboard or mouse and you can adjust the speed with which the images move across your screen. Each image of a page’s contents is accompanied by a short ”snippet” describing that page. Only problem is that the Google Viewer doesn’t seem to be able to use the style sheets for the pages shown so some of them (including this) look a bit odd.
All you do is enter a search term in the box, click ”Google Search” and then use the buttons to control play and move forward or back to individual pages if you feel the need for it.
The Google Viewer requires Javascript to be enabled, and works on PC and Mac with Internet Explorer 5 & above, Netscape 6 & above as well as Mozilla (at least with Chimera Navigator).
For Unix, Mozilla of course is the choice browser.
Oh. The URI is http://labs.google.com/gviewer.html