Marketing on Internet Road 

Following Google roll-out of its new search feature named Google Instant (where search results appear as you are typing your search query), and Google new Google Places revolution (where local results appear as the organic results on its first page), Google also introduced – rather silently – another interesting feature – Google Instant Preview.

In case you haven’t noticed it, Google had placed a small magnifying glass to the right of the web page title on the search results. If you click on this magnifying glass, a preview of the destination page is presented nicely on the right side of the page, so you can take a look at how the page looks like before actually visiting the page from Google search results page.

What is the Idea with Google Instant Preview?

Google main idea has always been “Relevance”. This is what brought Google to where it is today.
This concept means something like “we wish to deliver the most relevant (and accurate) search results and in the fastest possible way”. Therefore, Google is attempting to enable us as searches to see that the destination page we are about to visit is really relevant to our search query and with that to eliminate pages that rank with no real reason on the first page.  

Google Instant Preview Status

Google didn’t disclose too much information on this feature. What we can witness is that we see the magnifying glass of the Preview feature in some browsers but not in all of them. There are also still search queries where this feature is not available. This could be an indication that this feature is still being rolled out and tested by Google (which is the same as with the other new changes Google had introduced).

Google Instant Preview Implications

It is very soon to have any conclusions on the implications of this new feature. The Online Marketing community’s buzz has a lot of idea and possibilities but obviously nothing is conclusive. More conclusive implications will surely come after this feature had been rolled out properly and had run for a while.

Just as well, here is out attempt at forecasting the implications:

1.   Pay per Click (Google AdWords): Surprisingly enough, Google is placing the preview of the page on the right side of the page in a way that the Google Adwords listings disappear. This is surprising as AdWords is Google’s milking cow and if this will cause less clicks (leading to less advertisers as well), Google stand to lose.

Therefore, our estimations at this point are that AdWords campaigns will face a drop in clicks once (if) users are becoming used to use the Google Instant Preview feature (and it is an “if”).

Note: This is even more surprising since the other new changes to Google, like the Google Places Search, are placing elements on the right-hand of the search results page, overriding the AdWords listings. Google knows something we don’t?

2.   Site Re-Design: if the online community will start using the preview feature, the way your website (you web page actually) looks like will have a lot of impact on whether your potential visitors will visit the page or not.

It is rather safe to assume that if your web page does not look well and/or does not look relevant to the search query of the visitor, she will not click to visit.

Note that at this point in time, the preview does not present all page equally and even nicely designed pages but such that contain chunks of flash as example comes out badly on the preview image. Again, it is too soon to know if this is an issue that is being solved as part of the implementation or a feature that is here to stay.

3.   Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The visits from organic results have a potential to change, depending on this new feature. As we saw exampled where pages’ position on Google listing where changes according to click-stream for a certain keywords, it could be that we will see the same phenomenon here: if a page is ranked but people don’t click to visit, it might drop in position.

We also can’t overlook the possibility that the ranking algorithms (the plurals here is not a mistake – there are multiple algorithms being tested constantly) will take also the Preview feature into account, one way or another.


I will be more than glad to hear your thoughts and experiences with Google Instant Preview.