Google Instant Previews is the latest in a series of improvements that Google has added to their search engine. Instant Previews add a small spying glass next to each page title in the Google search results. Hovering over the spying glass does nothing, as Instant Previews needs to be activated once by clicking on any of the displayed spying glasses. Once clicked hovering over any search results listing will display a visual snapshot of that website.
Why has Google implemented this new feature? According to Raj Krishnan there are three main reasons for the implementation:
- Quickly compare results – A visual comparison of search results helps you pick the one that’s right for you. Quickly flip through previews to see which page looks best.
- Pinpoint relevant content – Text call outs, in orange, will sometimes highlight where your search terms appear on the webpage so you can evaluate if it’s what you’re looking for.
- Interact with the results page – Page previews let you see the layout of a webpage before clicking the search result. Looking for a chart, picture, map or list? See if you can spot one in the preview.
Google Instant Previews is currently not available for everyone. Users who want to give it a try can access the temporary page to enable it for their web searches.
Some Internet users may want to disable that feature, and this guide shows them how to do it. Please note that the methods may cease to work in the future.
- Use Opera: Instant Previews is not working in Opera currently. If you go to the test page and opt in to try it out you get the message “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available.” on the search results page. Other web browsers may show a similar behavior (but not Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome.
- Block scripts on Google. Use an extension like NoScript to block scripts on Google. This blocks Instant Previews. It may however have side effects on other Google.com properties.
- Switch to a localized Google search engine. This solution is temporary as the feature is rolled out to all Google search engines.
- Use a custom Google search engine such as Scroogle. Scroogle offers the same result set but without the elements that have been added by Google in the past year. No sidebar, no instant previews, no instant search, less ads and no tracking.
Google Instant Previews is an unobtrusive feature that becomes active after the user clicks on a spy glass. That’s how it works now. It is however likely that Google will implement the feature directly, so that users do not have to click to activate it.
On a personal note. I do not use it because it slows down my searching. What’s your take on Instant Previews?
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“What’s your take on Instant Previews?” – For the last year or so, every “improvement” Google’s rolled-out for their search engine has made it worse. They should stop screwing with something that worked.
GOOGLE IS so stupid this time, fuck Google.
SWITCH TO BING!
Or you can just open the site to the right! fly through results instead! Sweet search keeps your google results on the left and loads them on the right. http://bit.ly/searchkrack
Google is doing some crazy things in the name of enhancing (their employees) experience. First it was with Gmail and how crazy they laid that out, now it’s with it’s search engine. if they’re adding new features, give the user PERMANENT control to disable or enable features. Not disabling for the session or the webpage.
The more Google is doing c rap liek this, the more I am using other services including Yahoo and Bing.
I think Google has gotten too big in their mind that they cant seem to think clearly.
LOL OMG, no need for scroogle! http://google.com/custom
I absolutely HATE this INSTANT feature, it has slowed down my searches so many times, so many times it just freezes what I type, it tries to outsmart me with guesses, then I want to turn it off FOREVER, but it keeps coming back the next day for more pain. It’s likethey force this on us. This probably stems for google staff being out of touch with the world beause they have some super fast (fiber optics) internet speed to engineer new features, so they think the entire world is super fast, also INSTANT makes me feel bad because when I turnoff it says my connection is SLOW when it is just ordinary. Dear google please remove instant, and by default, this is probably the most annoying thing since last year YOUTUBE is forcing this VEVO crap on us.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh, those previews are just a pain the the a… !!! no more.
What the hell were they thinking? ! Either I find something to deactivate this stuff or I’m moving to bing/Yahoo.
I too was annoyed by the instant preview. It was taking up to 120 seconds to render the page every time I performed a search or hit “next”. I use Google a few hundred times a day, so this was intolerable. I noticed however that some of my friends didn’t seem to have the same slowness. After some investigation I discovered disabling “ChromFrame BHO” fixed all of my slowness issue. The slowness was definitely introduced by instant preview, but ChromeFrame contributed to the problem substantially. If you’re having the same problem you may want to check your “add ons” to see if ChromeFrame is turned on. If it is turn it off and see if that helps. I still think instant preview is pretty useless. The way Bing handles it is much more useful and less intrusive.
It’s useless and annoying as piss. Can’t turn it off? I can turn google off.
A useless, mandatory extension does not qualify for the word ‘feature’.
It is an intrusion, an imposition.
A few months introduction of “instant” I switched to Bing for two months, but Bing started showing Bing rewards and other crap, and the quality was no good.
So I switched back to Google but thought myself to use Firefox search bar (Ctrl + k) to avoid instant, reading your comments I changed my home to https://encrypted.google.com
For now, I really wish a serious competitor shows up in the search business, Google can then go to the smart phone business and leave serch business for good
Unfortunately, Bing has followed Google into the abyss. I didn’t notice the problem before this week – I was a diehard IE7 user and it didn’t work in the browser for some reason – maybe the config was just right… Now I’m on IE8 and both Google and Bing have the stoopid “preview”, with no way that I can find yet to disable it. I give up, you’ve convinced me – I’m going to join the crowd and install Linux Mint11 and start using Firefox. OMG! I never thought I’d actually do that…
@mike Moving to Linux doesn’t help, nor does moving to Firefox by itself. I finally got sick of it and found out how to banish instant preview forever! Using the ABP extension with the element helper and putting in the rule google.com.au##.vspii
did the trick!
Yep I agree, Google’s days on top are numbered, roll on the next big thing. (oh and please hurry!)
Here a new Greasemonkey script which disable a lot of things, including Google Instant:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/120144
Developed for Firefox only, for now, though.