While browsing my visitor logs, I came across viewfour.com. It’s an interesting site, it does something similar to my old SearchMash Java applet and ManagedQ’s much more advanced engine, displaying live previews of search results. It does suffer from a problem with frame-busting sites unfortunately, for example this search for Pete Warden winds up with the toolfarm preview taking over the parent frame. That was a big reason why you either need some decent script-blocking code, or deploy it as a browser extension where you can prevent child frames from taking control.

I was curious to discover that there weren’t any organic reviews for the site that I could find, and the copyright was 2005. Most of the Google results pointed to download pages. It also includes a link to ViewSmart, a spyware/malware blocker, which seemed like an odd combination to go with a search engine. In fact, the only user-created review I found in the first few pages was this negative one from a spyware information site. I don’t recommend paying too much attention to anonymous posters, but if you do try out the search site, it would be prudent to avoid the additional download until I can find out more information about it. I’ll see if I can get more information directly from the author, SSHGuru.