My favorite among the many alternatives to Google these days is semantic search engine Duck Duck Go. And this great little search engine just got better — it now offers quick and useful previews of the sites in the search results, so you don’t have to click through to know if you’ve found what you are looking for.

This is how they do it:

1. Go out and grab the current version of the page.
2. Turn it into paragraphs of text.
3. Look for the most relevant paragraphs given the search terms.
4. Highlight those paragraphs in the preview window.

Similar features are available: On Ask, Ujiko, Nexplore and Viewzi, you get a thumbnail preview of the page in question. The Firefox addon Google Preview adds thumbnail previews to Google search results.

Duck Duck Go’s text based previews is an early release and currently works best for informational queries and on informational sites. Based on my test searches, this technology could very well be much more useful than the more common thumbnail previews.