Is Google Experimenting With Full Page Previews?

[engine]

According to reports [businessinsider.com], Google is experimenting with full page previews in the SERPs.

Anyone else spotted them?

[indyank]

I am sure that it will be disastrous for publishers...it is worser than using an iframe and publishers will then have no other option but to protest heavily in all forms...

They are already stealing images and this would be yet another bad report for publishers...

[theentry]

Not looking good... CTR wise :|

[HuskyPup]

Not looking good... CTR wise :|

I know where you're coming from however it could also be very beneficial for those with relevant, information-packed pages. It sure as heck won't do all those MFA pages, very thin sites and, dare I say it, those wishy-washy white/light grey/light blue web 2.0 sites any good whatsoever.

The jury's out for the moment but could it be the best anti-spam site move yet?

What do you think?

[indyank]

HuskyPup, i would be really interested in knowing how it could be beneficial to information-packed pages as you suggest?

But they definitely can't steal content and call it an anti-spam move?

[theentry]

I see only more traffic for sites listed below the first few positions. But still your site can have it all what the surfer needs, but they will just bypass it because they don't like the layout or color scheme on the thumbnail they see...

[indyank]

I see only more traffic for sites listed below the first few positions. But still your site can have it all what the surfer needs, but they will just bypass it because they don't like the layout or color scheme on the thumbnail they see...

it is not a thumbnail and it is a full page preview...But I am also not sure what will be presented in the full page preview...everything on the page or just a few sections...but knowing google, they may show information in such a way that you don't have to visit that page...

and in effect, you are suggesting that it could help spammy sites by decorating themselves with good layout or color scheme...

[theentry]

I know that it's not a tumbnail but it's still smaller then the real page size.. Of course users would not click on parked sites anymore because of this which is good.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

To me it looks like they have taken the Bing "More on this page" a bit further. It's just another reaction to a feature Bing introduced.

[HuskyPup]

i would be really interested in knowing how it could be beneficial to information-packed pages as you suggest?

How many sites do you visit and bounce straight back because what you are looking for evidently is not there? If you can see the page is possibly good for you then the user is more likely to click through.

But they definitely can't steal content and call it an anti-spam move?

Same argument actually, you can see if it's crap therefore most intelligent users won't click through if they can see that it's an MFA or crammed with ads etc.

I'm not saying I'm right however there could be some benefits to this, I'd like to see it in action before siding either way however Google had better be prepared for a possible reduction in AdWords income if users start filtering out sites using this process...and of course AdSense publishers could adversely be hit as well:-(

[iThink]

From the blog that I mentioned in the other thread [webmasterworld.com...]

One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information.....The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results.

So there is no need for a potential customer to visit my site. He can see a full page preview with a part of the preview image that is deemed useful by google highlighted for him.

Quality content will no longer be helpful for converting a visitor into a customer. Who will bother to read my 250 words describing the widget that I'm selling on my site? A good design with all the bell and whistles like flash will win. People will make decision to buy from a particularly simply by seeing the images in the preview along with a few words or lines of text highlighted by google.

If this "feature" is rolled out then this will be the most serious attempt ever by google to kill businesses that depend on organic SERPs for a significant part of their overall traffic.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Disaster for publishers is an understatement. Once people get used to seeing full webpages while still on Google they may become alienated to actually visiting those sites. At the very least if you block this feature on your site, and Google shows nothing, visitors may bypass you altogether creating favoritism.

Hate it, enough to ban google from my sites just like any other content scraper. Google has no right to display copyrighted content in full without permission. I'd actually sue them myself over this one. Talk about a "borg" like collective mentality, they spend relatively little on their own content yet use everyone's to make themselves stinking rich!

[iThink]

Google has no right to display copyrighted content in full without permission.

Well they are a monopoly and if they have decided to kill my business and yours too, then good luck to us. That is the nature of this beast.

[theentry]

Google has no right to display copyrighted content in full without permission.

You can ask them to not to list your site...

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

You can ask them to not to list your site.

You don't have to ask anyone not to infringe your copyright. The law is the law. I don't have to ask anyone not to steal my car.

[Status_203]

Anyone know how robots/"noarchive" is treated?

[idolw]

Just imagine preview with instant directly in chrome. Like in sci-fi movies. You type one letter and the first page shows up automatically, you add another letter and the page changes and so on until you finish your query or complete forget what you wanted :)

[Mark_A]

The ever onward march of google, I think they are slowly convincing themselves that it is their content, not everybody else's. It did not help that we permitted them to cache our pages, this could be for them a logical extension of that.

[idolw]

Yep. They allowed us to cache their content. This means they gave the content to us, right?

[backdraft7]

Cripes, it's just one feature roll out after another...I thought we were out of the woods, now THIS?
Google's really screwing up what used to be a good thing.

[HansJorgo]

I don’t understand, how do they get the pages? Is this a bot loading all pieces of a page, or is this a prefetch?

[Robert Charlton]

Large screen shots prompted a huge negative reaction about two years ago in this WebmasterWorld discussion about SearchMe, a new engine with a very attractive interface, where the size of the screen shots was considered by many to be a threat to click-throughs.... [webmasterworld.com...]

While members discussed blocking SearchMe or at least not allowing it to archive content, that solution is more problematic with Google if large screen shots are implemented. Google drives a lot more traffic than SearchMe did. Site owners might be in a very difficult position if they're the only listing on a serp without a page preview.

A lot of course depends on the particulars of your site and page, and on the nature of your business model.

[Lorel]

Seems to me, if Google would just "scrape" a portion of the page (upper left quadrant for instance) just to give you enough so you can decide if this site might answer your query or if it's a MFA site, or parked domain, etc., then this would be a good idea. Of, course then Google won't make any money off the 2 later.

[tristanperry]

Oh great. I welcome Google crawling my website - naturally - but not effectively scraping my hand written and unique content and displaying it without permission on their site via full page previews.

The EU and USA anti-competition departments have been very strict with Microsoft in the past, so here's hoping that - if Google go ahead with this - they'll take action?

Why can't they use small screenshots? What someone like Web Of Trust and some other Web 2.0 properties do give you an instant idea of what a website looks like and its sort of content, without allowing you to seriously read the content.

Plus as one of the articles I read points out, this silly full page preview will block the side ads. Please tell me that Google aren't seriously considering this (I fear they might be though, since it would massively drive up key click bids on its AdWords)?

[iThink]

Seems to me, if Google would just "scrape" a portion of the page (upper left quadrant for instance)...

You may want to look at the screenshots once again. It appears that they are showing preview of the full page and the size of preview seems to be limited by the size of the monitor only. If a visitor has a big enough monitor, then he longer needs to visit your site.

Say goodbye to counting page-views and CTR etc.

[nomis5]

Anyone know if ads (including Adsense) will be on the preview? If so can a user click on them? If so, who gets the click value?

[londrum]

it will probably be quite difficult for us to argue that google's doing anything wrong, since they've already gone to court and got permission to cache our pages.

if you think about it, you can already view a full page preview simply by clicking on the 'cache' link. all they are doing now is changing that to hovering over a link instead. there's not that much of a difference.

whoever that judge was who let them cache our pages should be booted out.

[iThink]

since they've already gone to court and got permission to cache our pages.

I have no problem with cache because when a visitor clicks on the "cached" link, he is taken to a page that is an exact copy of my page with a google's infobar added on the top of the page.

Let me repeat, this preview thing is different:

(a) It is stopping potential visitors from visiting my site.

(b) Parts of my page that are deemed useful by google are highlighed by google in the preview.

[Samizdata]

you can already view a full page preview simply by clicking on the 'cache' link

Webmasters can easily opt out of that "service" (though it should have been opt in).

if you block this feature on your site, and Google shows nothing, visitors may bypass you altogether

That is the real problem - even if you can find a way to say "no", the consequences could be severe.

The issue is not confined to Google, however, and is a general search engine trend.

...

[indyank]

whoever that judge was who let them cache our pages should be booted out.

Judicial and political system is corrupted everywhere and it is easy to influence them...but they all are taking webmasters' submission for granted...the problem started with bing and people were praising them and now google thinks that they can do the same thing...