Nov 9, 2010
Google Instant Preview enhances search results
On November 9, 2010 Google announced Instant Previews as yet another upgrade to its search results pages in an attempt to provide more information to support “stickiness”. It’s as simple as a small icon that looks like a magnifying glass next to the search results, which users can click to see a “preview” or “snapshot” of the linked website. These “previews” or “snapshots” may also include search terms in orange highlight where they appear in the resulting page. Google indicated on Tuesday that the enhancement increased user’s satisfaction with search results by 5% in internal testing. “We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take 4 or 5 seconds to load,” Raj Krishnan, Product Manager wrote in the Google Blog today. “With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under 1/10 of a second.”
This enhancement follows the launch of Google Instant in September, 2010 which completes search results while it’s being typed into search box, with the goal of significantly reducing time spent searching. You can try Google Instant Previews prior to its launch in the next few weeks in Google Labs or click here for more information.
Google Instant Preview results page example