Beyond Instant Results: Instant Previews - officially announced

[Bddmed]

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right.

[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

You can test it here:
[google.com...]

[indyank]

The previews aren't readable but then they are showing full page previews.If they make it more readable, people wouldn't have to go to the sites.

As I said earlier, google now strongly believes in doing what microsoft does and takes it one step beyond. Google believes that bing is making a dent in their share of search, because of these accessories.

Let me narrate a small story to explain this.You don't have to necessarily write good answers to score high marks in the exams.Rather you decorate your answers with neat and legible handwriting, underlining the headings, highlighting important text and have some decent supporting diagrams.That is it! The evaluator doesn't actually read through the answers, but he still gives good marks as he thinks that the answer will anyway be good, as it has been well presented. This still happens in the examinations here (in my country).

Google seems to be applying this logic into its core product.Way to go google.But i am not sure, at the moment, where it will lead you to.

[HuskyPup]

Hmmm...slow to load for me however the most interesting fact for me is that none of my images are being shown, all the ones missing in the SERPs are also missing here...just what have they done to me?

[indyank]

They have probably moved them to their own servers to save your bandwidth...lol (just kidding)

[danimalSK]

*tin foil hat on*

anyone think this might have been the cause of the indexing problems? presumably they have have had to change the way they represent pages in their index (especially as some of the previews highlight relevant kws). some very random tail pages have previews, not just popular content.

[northweb]

Man, this is very funny. Not sure what google is thinking but it's VERY distracting. So stupid of a move makes their results a REAL JOKE, distracting and messy looking. Guess, this will most definetly help out Bing for sure. Laugh is on you google so dum.

[londrum]

it looks like google has got something against adwords in the righthand column... last month it was the map they placed over them, which scrolls with the page, and this month its these big page previews, which completely obliterates them once you've clicked the magnifying glass.

[maccas]

Is this US only for now as I am not seeing them?

[tristanperry]

@maccass - have you tried the last link in the OP? They weren't working for me, but they are via the last link.

Anywhoo, my thoughts:

Pretty cool.

But it's copyright theft. Big time.

Which isn't so cool.

[maccas]

Thanks, yeah I had it selected as "standard results" on the left hand navigation.

[Dijkgraaf]

For some reason it doesn't have a preview of my home page (comes up with a message of "Preview not available") but does have a preview for another landing page on my site. According to the cache the home page was last fetched 1 Nov 2010 so it has fetched it recently.

[dvduval]

Next Google Announcement:

All your base are belong to us

I'm not sure I care for this. People work hard to on the presentation of their site, and the content, and the images. I would hope there would at least a "no preview" meta tag so webmasters can opt out of this.

For example, designs can often look beautiful at the full resolution but ugly wen compressed and shrunk. Also, seeing an overview of the page is different than seeing page in a browser. It's like Google is taking over yet one more step of the marketing in the search results.

I've been a fan of google for a long time, but I feel there is a some bloat going on here now.

Just like I want to pick up the phone and dial a number, I want to type a search and see the results. I don't need a bunch of confusing options. Right now I can't even use the down arrow to scroll through many of the pages.

As an advertiser, my google adwords on the right side might be missed, reducing the click through rate, because the screenshot covered the ad. Is google then going to turn off my ad because of low click through.

Strange stuff.

[tangor]

Using these "Instant Previews," netizens are "about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click," according to Google tests. Such tests were spotted in the wild early last month. "Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine," the company said in a Tuesday morning blog post.

To preview a page, you click on a small magnifying glass icon that appears beside search result. This launches an image of the page on the right-hand-side of Google's results page. Within this preview, relevant text may be highlighted and magnified. If you then hover your cursor over any other search result, you can preview those as well.

[theregister.co.uk...]

Some additional insights and pics of the results...

[mrguy]

I'm sure local adwords publishers will not be happy.

With this new feature and the floating map for local searches, all the ads on the right of the page are gone because they are now covered completly.

Once the adwords earnings start showing a decline, let's see how long all these great changes last.

[Staffa]

Following the link in the OP, no previews show in the UK

[indyank]

It is now live in google.com

[outrun]

It's live here as well, in Australia at least. And as far I can see its not using the latest cache data.

[indyank]

you are right outrun. It is live in oz and it is definitely not using the latest cache.So how many caches does google store?

whether you use noarchive or not, google stores page caches on their servers.noarchive just has the effect of not showing the cache link in SERPS.but these previews will show one version of the cache though it may not be readable, unless you have very sharp eyes.

[tangor]

The link I posted reveals this cache behavior:

Within this preview, relevant text may be highlighted and magnified. If you then hover your cursor over any other search result, you can preview those as well.

Dang difficult to do with a graphic image... there must be a content based result somewhere in Google's system... and they are not using it as "cache" but as keep the visitor on Google's site as long as possible.

I'm not liking it...

[scottsonline]

I like this feature. But why are some of the best sites in terms of validation not getting the snippets? Also this should be a user must click to activate deal. If you don't click on the spyglass it doesn't work.
To those that think this is bad for adwords my bet is come January we are about to see a major google facelift.

[indyank]

It is not a question of you liking it or not but it is a question of how ethical it is.But then in its current avatar, it may not affect websites. If they go beyond this, it will.

[indyank]

It looks like webmasters can block these previews by using nosnippet meta tag which which was originally intended to block snippet or description appearing in search results.

Both Google and bing are evil as they seem to say that if you want to opt out of previews, use the nosnippet meta tag, but we aren't going to give you a separate meta tag to control the previews!

While the text in the snippets and the callouts on the previews aren't going to be the same, why do they want us to use a single meta tag to control the different behaviors?

reference - [searchengineland.com...]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google figured out how to show my site on theirs but still can't figure out how to let me change my settings to show 100 results WITHOUT having to log out and shut off instant.

So I keep logging out and shutting off instant and suffering with being unable to change my default location as a result.

I can't even use previews as a result, lol, and I'm not limiting myself to just 10 mostly "shopping or places" results per page, I prefer what's now being shown in the 10-20 range these days. Where has Google's quality control gone?

[Pudders]

I was checking out a few sites (ours included) and noticed that there was a tear/rip through the graphical view on one of our pages... and also ebay? What does this mean?

[londrum]

it just means your page is very long. so the middle has been split out

[Pudders]

@ londrum - ahhhh... see - that's why I come here! :)

Cheers - Pudders

[leadegroot]

so... if the page itself were crawlable, but the css file was blocked in robots.txt... would that be one way to stop a snippet from appearing?
I'm not seeing it yet myself :(

[idolw]

it looks like google has got something against adwords in the righthand column...

Apparently, the righthand column ads are cheaper than the top ads. So it is better for Google to make us all fight for the 3 top spots.

[Bddmed]

Well, the ads don't have previews. So you need to click them to see what's behind.

[limoshawn]

also, if you do close a preview, where is your cursor and your eyes? sitting over and looking at the ads on the right side.