Apex Internet Blog

Instant Preview – The Latest Google Search Results Feature

Many of us may feel like we’ve only just caught our breath over the recent release of Google Instant in September, but the search giant does seem determined to keep us on our toes! The clever people at Google have made the user search experience even more efficient with the newly released, Instant Preview. Currently rolling out across the globe, you may have seen Instant Preview at work already.  This new visual feature can be identified as a magnifying glass that appears to the right of every search result. Google enables this by taking a snapshot of every page stored in its index. Once you have clicked on one of these magnifying glasses you will see a screenshot of that page appear to the right-hand side of the organic search results (see image below), continue to hover over other results with a magnifying glass and a similar screenshot of each page will also appear.

Not only can you preview the page relevant to your search term, Instant Preview will also match the words in your search query to the content on that page (shown as bolded text in a red outlined box) – removing the need for you to find the relevant section(s) of the page yourself. If there are several instances of where your query is mentioned on a page, Preview will add page breaks to the image to show you the different sections of the page. Up until now, users could only make an informed decision based on the snippet of text that appeared beneath each listing on the search results page, having to click through to the website to verify if it answered their query. Instant Preview eliminates much of this guess work.

Instant Preview lets users delve a little deeper during the initial stages of searching without the added complication of hitting the back button after realising that a particular page doesn’t answer their query. Preview lets users scan and verify that a page is relevant to their query via the expanded screenshot, thus saving them precious time and increasing their likelihood of clicking through if they are happy with the visual representation displayed. As noted in the Google Central Webmaster Blog: ‘Our testing shows that the feature really does help with picking the right result—using Instant Previews makes searchers 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click’.

What does all this mean for website owners? Firstly, you will want to check out how your website looks in this thumbnail view. Not only is more emphasis going to be placed on how aesthetically pleasing a website is now, it is likely to have a major impact on website redesign and how websites will be designed in the future.  Does the thumbnail view of your website clearly depict what your site is about? Website content has always been a recommended feature of any website and this looks set to be of even more importance. If your site contains all, or a lot of Flash technology, be aware that Instant Preview doesn’t currently support this and it will appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or black square - the Google Central Webmaster Blog however does note that they will be working on displaying such videos and Flash content accurately.

Like Google Instant, you can opt out of this feature. By adding the nosnippet tag, you can prevent previews from showing for your website – but doing so could have a detrimental effect on the traffic to your website. Instant Preview is likely to be a very helpful and widely used tool for users during the searching process. If your competitors have active previews and you don’t, what does this suggest to potential customers/clients/readers etc?

Given the freshness of this release, we will all be monitoring it closely, and likewise anticipating the next big surprise to the Google Search result pages.

Categories: Search
Posted on: 12th Nov 10 by Jessica Frandsen
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