I am building an interface similar to Google images search service. I know that Google is storing the thumbnails in the database and when you click on the thumbnail, it displays a page that is hot-linking to the image on the actual website.
Unlike Google, I'm trying to avoid saving the messages in the database. I'd like to display the thumbnails also using the hot-linking mechanism.
I have couple of questions regarding this approach.
How would the user experience be because the websites I am hot-linking to would have different speeds.
Is there any example of a website that does something similar? (One that uses only hotlinks)