Google Instant Preview: The Newest Innovation in Search Engine Results

Google is constantly trying to make a user's search experience better and faster. The company constantly updates the search algorithms and adds new features in the hopes of retaining their number one spot concerning search engine market share. According to a comScore report for the quarter ending September 2010, Google's US search engine market share rose .07 percent to come in with 66.1 percent, which keeps the company in the top spot. Yahoo! comes in second with 16.7 percent; Microsoft's Bing is third with 11.2 percent; Ask is fourth with 3.7 percent, and AOL is fifth with only 2.3 percent. With such a lead in market share, it would seem that the company has no reason to continue to add features-but they do anyway.

What is Google Instant Preview?

Just two months after releasing "Google Instant Search," which allows users to type less and get search results quicker, the company released a new feature called "Google Instant Previews." While it is simply another innovation developed by Google to help Internet users speed up the search process and it seems like a great idea, but it cold have a detrimental effect to some people. The idea behind Google Instant Previews is to allow searchers to see snippets of the websites that are listed on Google based on the users' keyword search. By hovering the mouse over the magnifying glass icon, a preview of the page that the search result the listing like will take you to appears. By seeing if the listed sites relevant to their search terms, the preview allows users to determine which site they want to visit before they click through to the site.

Google Instant Preview Impact

It is hard to determine whether Google Instant Previews is going to have a positive impact on Google users or if it will only complicate their experience.Even though Google is trying to enhance the user's experience by making everything instant, it may backfire on Google because users may suffer from information overload and slower result times.

The immediate benefit of Google Instant Previews is that a user can now quickly judge a site's relevancy by seeing if the previewed site is related to the user's search term so that users no longer have to go to each site and spend time on irrelevant websites. So, with the implementation of Google Instant Previews, it means that websites must now become more detail oriented if they are to expect visits through Google searches. One of two things could happen.

Detrimental to SEO?

First, it is entirely possible that Google Instant Previews could have a negative impact on those who rely on SEO to get their websites listed in the first pages of Google. Because many using SEO will bid on any popular keyword including keywords that are not relevant to search terms, their results hit the first listings whether they are related to the users' search terms or not. The sites using these techniques could see a drastic reduction in page views, especially if users decide to check out the sites using Google Instant Previews first; they will see that the listing is not what they were looking for instantly and as a result, will not visit the page.

Good-Bye Spam Results!

Second, as a result of visitors seeing the sites before visiting them, spam results might finally disappear. because users will not visit a site they know is not relevant to their searched keyword, SEO marketers will need to adjust the way they use keywords to get their results to the top of the listings. This could finally result in more relevant search listings and making Internet marketers using SEO a bit more honest.

Sources:
Google: Google Instant Previews FAQs
Press Release, "comScore Releases September 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings," comScore