Google Preview of Websites before clicking testing in Australia
Today I saw a new icon in Google and it seemed like I have not seen it before. In September Google had rolled out Google Instant and this was immediately viewable in Australia at least with the correct url or by using Google.com instead of Google.com.au.
I had heard reports earlier in October that searchers in the USA had been seeing something similar to Google Instant in that it could change the way that people interact with search engines taking them away from the standard “List of 10 blue links” into something more interactive and hopefully helpful.
Our research has shown fairly little change in traffic numbers on larger sites for either Google SEO or Adwords metrics with the rollout of Google Instant. It appears people do not for the most part change when using Google Instant or they haven’t at least yet.
This new thing is called “Google Preview” and it can show you a preview of the actual website before you go there and render the entire page normally.
Google is reading, then caching an image of websites pages it seems.
Here is a screen shot of a Google.com.au search for “Website Hosting” done today:
Do you see anything out of the ordinary? I was not sure at first when I saw it if it was something I had seen before but never used.
It is the little blue magnifying glass immediately after the Title tag:
When clicked on any of the 10 sites shown in the results on Google it does a parsing of the page and displays that image to the side. Strangely it is covering the paid Google Adwords ads. I had gotten used to the idea that Google never messed with their money or decreased the chance for ads to be clicked. This might actually affect Adwords Click Through Rates on terms you are running paid ads for but don’t have a strong SEO presence.
Once the first Magnifying Glass is clicked on it changes the search page to a mode where any result hovered over will create a preview pane for that page.
Here I have clicked on the first results glass and am now seeing a preview pane:
Wow that is one of the most interesting Search Results I have seen in a while.
Moving the mouse down the page to over the second result shows that pages preview. You don’t have to click to get more previews.
On this listing there is also a yellow insert pane with an orange border with the text that seems to be read from the site and the most relevant keywords to the search performed are highlighted.
The words in the pane are highlighted in bold and then the passage from the site is highlighted in orange on the preview pane.
Here is another screen shot from this search on “Website Hosting”. This is when I hovered down to the third result:
This 4th example shows the highlighted text again like the second and then highlights where it is from on the page:
What do you think of this feature?
Is this something that you think the average web surfer would do?
What affect do you think this will have on paid and unpaid traffic?
Are you seeing this on searches on Google.com.au or Google.com now where you are located?