If you have used the feature you may have stumbled upon search results with no preview images. The message “preview not available” appeared instead when moving the mouse over the search results entry. A lot of those sites did not have the spyglass icon next to them as well, which acts as a further indicator that no preview image is available.

But why are there sites with no preview image? The main reason for the preview not available error message is the safe search setting. Google sets safe search to moderate for all users by default which filters explicit images. The effect previously was mostly visible in Google’s Image search engine where the majority of explicit images were filtered from the search results.

Google has carried that over to Google Instant Previews, so that the preview not available is displayed for explicit website snapshots.

This can be tested by clicking on search settings at the top right of the Google Search page and switching from “Use moderate filtering (Filter explicit images only – default behavior)” to “Do not filter my search results” under SafeSearch Filtering.

Many preview not available messages show the screenshot of the web page afterwards. The page may need to be reloaded before the changes become visible in Google Search.

Google may also have not had time to process some of the websites in the search results. This is usually indicated by a missing spyglass next to the result.

What’s your take on Google Instant Previews so far? Let us know in the comments.

Google has made lots of changes to Google Search in the past, and while some of them made sense, others did not.

Google’s latest experiment is only accessible by a minority of search engine users, a typical sign of a feature that is tested with a life audience.

This experiment, apparently one of about 50-200 Google is running at all times updates the search results page automatically when the user types in characters in the search form.

While we did not have the option to test the feature, it looks similar to pages that are powered by Ajax to make content changes without reloadings.

SEO consultant Rob Ousbey was the first to spot the new experiment. Rob even made a video of the new feature which is embedded below.

As you can see, the contents of the search results page change with the characters typed into the search form.

But how useful is that new feature? Users who know what they are looking for may not need the auto updating search results nor the search suggestions displayed beneath the search form.

Users who only vaguely know what they are looking for may benefit from this slightly, as it visualizes the search results to them directly, so that it becomes possible to alter them by changing the phrase, all without page loads.

This on the other hand means that more bandwidth is used in Google Search, as every new search results page has to be loaded even if they are not used at all.

What’s your take on this new feature? Annoying, or useful?

The default type is comprehensive which means that Google observes everything for the user. It can be changed to video, blog or web related alerts which would exclude the rest of the types. Alerts can be send out once per day which is the default value. That can be changed to once per week and to when it happens which could mean that you get bombarded with emails if you happen to observe a popular term.

A Google account is needed to configure and manage the alerts. The mail on the other hand can be entered freely and does not have to be the Gmail address.

Make Use Of have posted about a service called Feed My Search today which converts Google Alerts into RSS Feeds. That’s definitely convenient to use and highly recommended.