New York — Google, in its insatiable quest to create a speedier and more useful user experience, just keeps upping the ante for search engines — this time with some visual liveliness — on Tuesday unveiled Instant Previews, a feature that will let users get a glimpse of search results pages by hovering over a magnifying glass icon next to the link.
The search engine titan debuted its Google Instant Previews search feature that provides a snapshot image previews of web pages to the search results, a visual method of flipping through results quickly.
“Instant Previews provides a visual 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,” Raj Krishnan, a Product Manager at Google, wrote.
This innovative functionality comes on the heels of the launch of Google Instant in September, which predicts users’ queries as they are being typed out. The just released Instant Previews feature is intended to increase the ease of finding a desired web page by providing a visual snapshot of a search result and highlighting the most relevant sections.
Google Instant Previews, which essentially empowers users the ability to view a website before they visit it. Google accomplishes this by taking a screenshot of every webpage in its index and giving users access to it via a magnifying glass icon that sits to the right of every search result.
The key component to Instant Previews though is that after searching for something, Google will return search results as usual, but next to the star icon that lets you favorite a link, there will also be a small magnifying glass. For instance, imagine you are trying to find information on a specific person on a page that lists dozens or hundreds of people. Instead of having to scroll through the entire page to find the person, you can just look at the Instant Preview and see where they are on the page.
“This is the next evolution of finding a result on a search engine results page,” distinguished engineer Ben Gomes, said in a statement.
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To utilize the feature, a user will have to click or hover over the magnifying glass adjacent to the title of any search result and an image of the page will pop-upon the right side of the search results page. It is an instant-glance view of the website’s content without actually having to visit the webpage. Once the feature is activated, a page preview will appear after hovering a cursor over any other result.
Instant Previews also works with the keyboard navigation shortcuts Google introduced recently. Pressing the right arrow key with a search result selected will energize Instant Previews. Pressing the left arrow key will stop it.
“In our experiment, we have 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 are looking for on the pages you visit,” Krishnan explains.
These option will help people navigate results faster and not waste time waiting for pages to load, Krishnan said. Google will also highlight in orange the text that matches your search query to locate relevant content as fast as possible.
“Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many Web sites take four or five seconds to load,” he wrote. “With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire Web, identify the relevant parts of each Web page, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search — usually in under one-tenth of a second. Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.”
Gomes states that there are a few specialized use cases where Instant Previews are particularly useful. One example he offered is when you are looking for specific charts, graphs or pictures, Instant Previews will show you where the search term occurs and you will quickly see whether the graph is appropriate to your search or not. Another is people search; by using Instant Preview, a user can quickly scan the page and find out if the page is about the person they are looking for.
Instant Previews is not live yet for everyone, but you can try it out by visiting this link. With Instant Previews enabled you will see a small magnifying glass next to the results.
However, Bing already provides a form of text previews. Google has been testing the feature for at least the past month. Google actually stores a screenshot of the websites it indexes for this new feature. This way, it can cull up the relevant portion and serve the image to the users, on average, in “under one-tenth of a second.”
Instant Previews will be rolled out to Google.com as well as the localized version in over 40 languages in the next few days.