Visual Previews for Google SERP Results are here!

Just when we thought searching on Google couldn’t get any faster or more user-friendly, Google unveils its latest stab at meticulously shaving mere milliseconds off the time we spend searching for things. This new search feature, called Instant Previews, allows Google users to instantly preview Web pages of interest without actually clicking on them. A small magnifying glass will appear next to each search result. By clicking on the magnifying glass, users will be able to see a preview of a particular search results while hovering the mouse over it. Part of the reasoning behind the development of Instant Previews was that Google wants to eliminate bad experiences where, after clicking on a search result, the user immediately clicks back to the search results to find a different one because it wasn’t what they were searching for. This preview feature should help save Google users’ time by avoiding all the clicking back and forth in Google’s never ending effort to help users access more relevant search results. Instant Previews is just another addition to Google’s features designed to speed up search. In combination with other features like Google Instant, which predicts what users will type before they actually type it, makes Google search faster and more in tune with its users. Some Google searches will highlight the area on the Web page where the search term appears to further speed up search for users. This feature is designed to help you decide if the topic, concept, person, etc is the same one you were searching for. This helps figure out if a search term was used consistently within the main content of the page or simply by coincidence. Popular Web pages will have their preview images stored by Google for faster display, and the other billions of Web pages will have their previews instantly generated within one-tenth of a second when someone clicks on its corresponding magnifying glass image. Google and other search engines have utilized page preview features before, but not to the sophisticated extent of Instant Previews. This is a first in the era of search where every millisecond matters. This is yet another example of how Google search is getting faster and more advanced by the day. The King of Search continues its rein.