Mountain View, California — Google is currently testing a revolutionary redesign feature in its search results pages that enables users to view full-page previews of the pages generated by its algorithms., a very interesting addition to its search page that slots in nicely with Google Instant, Blogstorm reports.
Patrick Altoft, a search-engine optimization consultant in the U.K., at BlogStorm discovered the test, providing the screenshot below and saying, “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. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results.”
The feature has been encountered by quite a number of users, so Google seems to be testing it with a wide number of people. Some searchers on Google are seeing a search results page where some results are highlighted with a blue background.
With the latest design, when a user moves the mouse over any of the search results, that result will highlight a preview of the website in the link, and a preview of the page appears in the right frame, like this:
Google’s new preview test generates very large pages with the query text highlighted. (Credit: Patrick Altoft/Blogstorm)
If that is the case, Google may be gearing up to launch another novel feature for everyone soon. Nevertheless, those that are seeing the test are getting a slightly different flavor of the Google Instant version of the search engine. But the really interesting thing is that a preview of the selected result is also shown, on the right. The preview is usually truncated if the page is especially long.
Furthermore, Google searchers can already refine their searches to generate results with page previews through the “search options” panel on the left-hand side of the search results page, but those previews are much smaller and are not automatically generated by a hover, like the ones spotted by Altoft. Search Engine Land notes that Ask.com and Microsoft’s Bing have offered similar preview options in the past.
Google does a lot of experimenting, and some of it lives and dies by the results of A/B testing. So there is no guarantee that this feature will ever attains a wide release. And Google is already worried about displaying certain sites in Instant results; actually previewing full pages would raise much larger concerns.
Nonetheless, the feature will certainly prove useful in discerning what sites are worth visiting. And it is likely to make the search process faster, something Google is always trying to do.
When reached out to Google for more information on the preview feature, the search engine giant brilliantly gave the classic response: “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.”