It’s only been about two months since Google launched their latest search engine feature, Google Instant, making it faster and easier than ever to get the results you’re looking for.
A few days ago, they launched yet another small but handy feature that will make it easy to filter through those results and determine which one is right for you, using Instant Previews.
On your search results page, each item is accompanied by a little magnifying glass. Clicking on the icon will activate the Instant Preview feature, and you will need to activate the feature for each search instance.
A small screenshot of the website will be displayed on the Google search page, displaying the general layout of the page, simply by hovering over each search result.
Anywhere the search word or phrase is displayed on the page will be highlighted in the preview.
In an attempt to make things as easy as possible for you, Google has implemented keyboard shortcuts for accessing Instant Preview. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between search results, and the right arrow key to display the preview.
To see Google Instant Previews in action, check out the video below.
Are you using Google Instant Preview? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.
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it shows pages very quickly
I noticed the instant preview the other day, and mine does not seem to need to be activated, as I scroll the page if my mouse hits one of the magnifying glasses up pops the preview. It’s annoying and distracting, I was hoping you knew how to turn it off. Great post btw.
Quite a lot of people seem to be really annoyed about it, although I really don’t understand why. I personally find it to be a really useful feature. However, a quick Google search throws up the following :
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/90394 – this Greasemonkey script for Firefox and Chrome will apparently disable Preview. I haven’t tested it so I don’t know how effective it is.
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/11/11/how-to-disable-google-instant-previews/ – this page has some good methods such as using Opera. Preview currently does not work in Opera apparently.
it shows pages very quickly
Quite a lot of people seem to be really annoyed about it, although I really don’t understand why. I personally find it to be a really useful feature. However, a quick Google search throws up the following :
http://userscripts.org/scripts… – this Greasemonkey script for Firefox and Chrome will apparently disable Preview. I haven’t tested it so I don’t know how effective it is.
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/11/… – this page has some good methods such as using Opera. Preview currently does not work in Opera apparently.
that’s the same feature that got me to use vivisimo as a search engine a couple of years ago, the site preview is nice.
Bing had this preview feature before Google and does a great job at it. It was only a matter of time before Google incorporated this as well, specially as a follow-up to Google Instant.
Google instant previews is one feature not liked by lot of users much like to Google Instant search. Google Instant and instant previews can hamper user’s bandwidth.
I like the new feature as well. I can go through results faster this way.
I HATE this feature! I like scrolling down the page quickly and this slows things down considerably and makes it harder to navigate. I constantly have to turn Instant off but when I log back into gmail its back again. Google please make it easier to permanently turn this off!!!!