Google Give Searchers 'Instant Previews' of Result Pages 252
First pressing 'Enter' was to much work... now actually clicking on the links and visiting the sites is to much, too... Google is testing instant previews, where you can see a miniature rendered view of the landing page without requiring you to click through and back-arrow.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:5, Informative)
Well it's very easy to turn it off, just click the settings link at the top of the page.
The drop down also does not obscure any of the page, it pushes it down.
If you don't want to use new helpful Google features, you have the option to opt out of them, but Google does a significant amount of testing on their pages for usability so I'm sure most people will find these features helpful.
Don't like it? (Score:3, Informative)
Me neither. And I don't like "Google Instant' either.
Know what I do about it?
I turn it off! Just turn it off and forget it was ever implemented.
If someone out there likes this stuff, fine. They can have it. That doesn't mean that the people who don't like it are forced to deal with it.
Re:Ads (Score:4, Informative)
For a few billion popular Web pages, Google will store the images of the pages. For others, it will generate the preview on the fly, in less than one-tenth of a second, Mr. Krishnan said.
source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/google-introduces-visual-previews-of-search-results/ [nytimes.com]
Re:Sometimes competition isn't so good (Score:4, Informative)
I do not know about you, but this "instant off" option requires cookies and I do not browse with cookies enabled by default - that is just asking for trouble!
Furthermore, even though I wish the internet was really fast everywhere, it isn't. Features like this "instant on" feature slow down my typing: I have come to the point and typing speed that I know what my search term is and I don't wait one term at a time to see if I want to "narrow my searching field" by selecting another term. I can type at 60 words per minute+...I do not want their help
Oh and it gets really annoying when I type something, hit enter, then have it do a completely different search for me because my mouse pointer was floating near by...
I really want something like the following:
http://www.google.com/classic [google.com]
No frills, no extra bandwidth consumed, no searching for the wrong damn thing when I didn't ask for it, and no Google recommend...these new features are just as useful (to me) as the operating systems and likewise gui on Verizon Wireless cellphones - which is completely hideous. /endrant
PS: yes I will still use Google, I just wish for a simpler time
Link to Instant Preview (Score:3, Informative)
There is now a link on Google's homepage for you to try out the instant preview feature. Or you can go from here: http://www.google.com/landing/instantpreviews/ [google.com]
Btw one other nice thing is that you can now use instant preview to easily see how exactly Google's crawler "sees" a web page. (Though yes Google Cache can show it too but is in HTML with broken CSS and images)
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:3, Informative)
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:3, Informative)
Just thought I'd give you some helpful awesomebar search advice:
If you right-click a search box for a website in Firefox, you'll see "Add a keyword for this search". You can select that, save it as a bookmark with a unique keyword (I just shove mine in a Keyword Searches folder in Unsorted Bookmarks), and it'll let you use that search box from the awesomebar! For example, if you save Google image search as "img", you can type "img kittens" and get a search for kittens on Google images. Or if you save Wikipedia as "wp", you can type "wp goatse" and get the Wikipedia page for goatse! I've completely replaced the search bar with this and it's very simple and useful. Cheers!
PS: OpenDNS is awesome; nice to see someone using it!