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.
"But I didn't actually VISIT that page" (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only useless but also distracting (Score:5, Interesting)
First Google Instant and now this. What's the value in seeing a small thumbail of the page? The text is too small to read anyway and this will only add to the distraction. You can't evaluate a page based on the layout or how it looks. You're usually looking for content when you search.
visual people (Score:5, Interesting)
I like this feature for a couple reasons. I'm a visual person, I like seeing if the site is the one I remember before I go visit, or if it's a spam-link-farm kind of page that's just wasting my time. I also like their "highlight" that shows WHERE in a page I'll find the sought phrase they snipped.
I also like the Google Flip feature at the bottom of their news page, but I don't like the two-click process to visit the site. Clicking on the preview gives a (useless) bigger preview, and then clicking on that takes you to the showcased page. Without the second preview, it would be a nice little stumbleupon-like way of finding interesting stories/news/ideas around the web.
Re:"But I didn't actually VISIT that page" (Score:3, Interesting)
YAY! Preview-porn is best-porn!
And just think of all those links to goatse-guy (and similar) that we're going to suffer through.
Never mind, we'll probably all go to jail if even one kiddie-porn link shows up in search results for regular porn...
Ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:-1 Please No! (Score:3, Interesting)
And they store the on/off switch in a cookie, not with your normal google account settings. So each time cookies are cleared in a webbrowser you have to set it again. Very annoying.
Re:Not only useless but also distracting (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the value in seeing a small thumbail of the page? The text is too small to read anyway and this will only add to the distraction. You can't evaluate a page based on the layout or how it looks. You're usually looking for content when you search.
Actually, there is a lot of value in this, at least for me. A lot of times I find that I'm trying to go back and re-find some page the I found in the search results a while back. In my head, I know exactly what the page looks like, but currently I have to click on each link one at a time, wait 1 to 10 seconds for each page to load, go back, and repeat. This would be much quicker.
Aside from that, I'm sorry to tell you, but one often CAN evaluate a page based on how it looks.
Re:"But I didn't actually VISIT that page" (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah because Google has such massive problems with the image search. </sarcasm>
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, I do all my googling from the search bar / URL awesomebar. Hell, even if my browser doesn't happen to support awesomebar, opendns returns a page with a google query to whatever text I typed.
I don't recall the last time I actually did a search from google.com.
Re:Just stop it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Good for dialup, wireless? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike Google Instant, which shuts off on slow web connections, Instant Previews is available to those on thin connections and could be more beneficial to those users than to those using fat pipes, since the question of which page to click and allow to load is far more crucial on dial-up than on a fiber connection
I am skeptical. I guess loading an image is faster than loading the actual page, but if the page is mostly text then the preview would be slower.
I also wonder how well this preview works with Web Accelerator or Opera Turbo. Oftentimes they squash images to the point where they are unintelligible - I wonder if the same would happen with google preview.
Reduces bounce rate (Score:3, Interesting)
What's with all the hate? Lots of sites have a bounce rate between 30 and 50% [citation needed]. If seeing a half-loaded page is enough for 50 to 70% of people to
decide to leave, isn't it reasonable that a preview would be enough too?
I'd have to use it to decide if the interface is more annoying than useful (obviously)... but there's at least potential there. Heck, depending on whether google caches or optimizes the preview, this could reduce wasted bandwidth as well.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:2, Interesting)
Whenever a new annoying feature pops up that people complain about, there are always a couple of comments that go "oh, but you can easily turn it off". That's great if you are only going to use one computer regularly.
For everyone else who does need to use several computers in a week, it's very annoying to almost always have to tweak the default settings to something that doesn't bug you. School computers, work computers, library computers, etc. all carry default settings that don't necessarily migrate with you between sessions when changed.
It's automation, not laziness! (Score:5, Interesting)
"First, pressing Enter was too much work..."
No. Pressing Enter was pointless, and clicking through to the page was pointless. Obviously, if I'm taking the trouble to go to a search engine and type in words, I want to search for them. It's idiotic to have to tell the machine that. Likewise, I don't care about the links, I want the page itself, so it makes sense to pull it up right away.
The whole point of having a machine is to automate repetitive tasks, and that's what Google is doing here.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, but you don't!
If you're using Noscript, whitelist maps.google.com (by default, Noscript whitelists the entire domain - but you can whitelist subdomains manually) and gstatic.com. There's no need to whitelist all of google.com.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm always surprised that google hasn't just listened and given us http://simple.google.com./ [simple.google.com] It'd get rid of any whining and allow them to clutter the front page as much as they like.