Neal Stephenson and his fans reason to rejoice today. Buried beneath a bunch of announcements about blah blah realtime search blah Twitter is a great new Google feature: More Text. Check out this pageful of bliss : A bunch of Star Trek reviews from the past 24 hours, with extra-long text summaries and NO PICTURES.
To use More Text, do a Google search. Then, on the results page, click the Show Options link beneath Google's logo. On the left side of the results page, a list of options appears. The tenth clickable link says "More text." Click that. YES! Google triples the size of the text excerpt for the top result, and doubles the length of those below, as long as there's enough text on the page to fill the space.
I haven't yet figured out how to make More Text my default, except to bookmark a search results page that has More Text enabled and do my searches from there.
Self-styled "geeks" who really just like to look at themselves on Web 2.0 can click the link above More text, "Images from the page." But at last Google has acknowledged that a small fraction of its users can and do actually read . In honor of the event, I'm going to work in command-line mode all afternoon.
Photo by teensleuth