Google is getting even more instant. Having already launched Google Instant, which shows results immediately as you type, it’s now rolling out Instant Preview.
With Instant Preview, users can see a snapshot of a web page in search results by clicking on a magnifying-glass icon that appears next to most results. In many cases, the search phrase appears highlighted in a box on the preview screen.
‘New Kind of Visual Search’
Google said Instant Preview is usually provided in a fraction of a second after the magnifying glass has been clicked, since page previews are loaded in the background as search results come in. Once the magnifying glass has been clicked on a page of search results, the user only needs to hover over other magnifying-glass icons for the snapshot pages to appear.
If desired, a user can also use mouseless searching, as with Google Instant. In Google Instant, a searcher can use cursor keys to navigate between results, and, in Instant Preview, a right-arrow key can similarly be used to see the snapshot, or a down-arrow key to browse through the search results. The idea is that cursor keys could be quicker than navigating to all those links with a mouse.
In a posting Monday on the Official Google Blog, Product Manager Raj Krishnan wrote that Instant Preview makes “finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine.” He described Instant Preview as “a leap to image-based snapshots,” and a “new kind of visual search result.”
Krishnan said the company’s testing found that users were five percent more likely to be satisfied with search results if Instant Preview was used. The new feature, he said, allows a user to quickly compare results, pinpoint relevant content through the text callouts that highlight search terms in the snapshots, and assess whether…