Amazon, and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Alexa Internet, launched recently the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service.

Usually, there is always a surprise behind a clickable URL (a link) as you don’t know how the page that is about to load will look like. Some people like surprises and some don’t. For those who don’t, Alexa though it will be useful to provide them a clickable thumbnail of the page they are about to visit.

Actually, the Alexa Site Thumbnail is addressed to web developers and allows them to obtain programmatic access to URLs for home page images in Alexa’s collection, which they can use to incorporate thumbnail images of web site home pages into their own applications.

“Developers are constantly looking for ways to make their websites more visually appealing and to save their users time,” said Alexa Vice President of Engineering Niall O’Driscoll. “In just minutes and inexpensively, developers can use the new Alexa Site Thumbnail web service to achieve both these goals.”

The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service enables developers to enhance web sites, search results, web directories, blog entries, and other web real estate with images of web site home pages that Alexa has collected from crawling the web. Including web site thumbnail images improves the user experience by allowing end users to preview sites before clicking through to the web site.

Alexa has millions of images available and is adding more daily. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service allows developers to customize the size and format in which Alexa’s thumbnail images can be displayed in their own applications. There is no minimum fee or start-up cost to use the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service.