Google Previews is official & coming to the UK
When I broke the news that Google was showing full page previews in the search results most people thought it was an interesting test. I doubt many of the 25,000 people who read that post actually thought it would become a real feature.
Today Google has announced that previews will be rolling out across 40 countries in the next few days.
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. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing.
In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit. Here are some of the things you can do to get the most out of Instant Previews:
- Quickly compare results – A visual comparison of search results helps you pick the one that’s right for you. Quickly flip through previews to see which page looks best.
- Pinpoint relevant content – Text call outs, in orange, will sometimes highlight where your search terms appear on the webpage so you can evaluate if it’s what you’re looking for.
- Interact with the results page – Page previews let you see the layout of a webpage before clicking the search result. Looking for a chart, picture, map or list? See if you can spot one in the preview.
This is great for sites that are well designed and have a layout that suits the preview image sizes. It’s not so great for any brand that uses Flash without images to fall back on or geotargeting without overriding the IP delivery for search engines.
Click this search for an example of how Flash looks.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 10 comments below, or add your own!
It actually makes a lot of sense, however I find it just okay after all. What’s new is that yeah you can see the sneak preview of a web page and that will give you an idea how the site looks like. I’m not surprised that Google did that but it is indeed help so two thumbs up still. Thanks for sharing.
This sounds like a good feature Patrick, but it doesn’t seem to be on Google UK yet. I like the idea of a more visual search facility, and I’m looking forward to using it.
John
Hi Patrick, I can see this would be a useful addition, save some time looking at sites that are good for SEO but not humans. As John said not available in the UK yet so will have to wait to pass judgment.
Pete
I think it will be interesting to see how many websites decide they need to look at their design again, I would love to see some stats in a month of so on how the live preview has effected site visitors
I’ve seen this lately on Google.com and I’ve got to say, it really sucks. From a searcher’s perspective, the previews are way too small to be able to read whether the text is actually relevant, search terms highlighted or not. You can only see the basics of the site’s design, which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with its usefulness.
From a webmaster’s standpoint, anything that allows people to avoid coming to the site is awful. I’m certainly going to be trying to find a way to jam up this new “feature” that looks like it will be as bad as Google Images at eating up loads of bandwidth and clogging my log files – without providing actual buying traffic in return.
Its not new now everyone had noticed this preview and now the websites should have to worry not only about SE ranking but also about designs.
It is cool indeed!
but it may crate some problems for SEOs and webmasters because they have to optimize the pages accordingly as user can see instant previews not even going to resource page..
let us see what happens…
Austin, I don’t think it will create to many issues from SEO’s as it wont affect page position in the rankings, it will just effect if that position will convert to a click which should be part of an SEO’s job anyway(but thats another topic) – I always tell a client if a website is of poor design and often suggest a redesign before we start on SEO if a site is really bad – as I feel part of an SEO’s job is to increase profits from the site not just position in the rankings.
Personally I think this is great news for people using the internet and will bring a better experiance for users of google, first impressions count and lets face it if people are not going to click based on a preview they will probably have clicked the back button anyway.
Yes this true that poor design of a website always have a bad impact on SEO, but still SEO will be effected by this bedause if design is poor it will not be converted into clicks.
I agree with LeaderABW, annoys the hell out of me – i much prefer the results without the previews.
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November 10, 2010 at 12:08pm