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Google Give Searchers 'Instant Previews' of Result Pages

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the no-time-to-waste dept.

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.

5 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Not only useless but also distracting by recoiledsnake · · Score: 4, 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.

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    1. Re:Not only useless but also distracting by LordKronos · · Score: 4, 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.

  2. visual people by Speare · · Score: 4, 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.

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  3. It's automation, not laziness! by sco08y · · 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.

  4. Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google by __aagctu1952 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yep, that does cure most of what ails it. But 1) most people don't know how to do this, and 2) it's a damned nuisance even tho I can do it with one tick of a checkbox.

    And then you've got to turn it back on to get any useful behaviour from Google Maps, tho they've become so cumbersome of late

    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.