A wide awake blogger caught sight of something that Google is working on behind the scenes as he stumbled onto what is obviously the testing of a new page preview feature for Google search. The effect could profound for SEO and site views. No more would you click through onto some page that you didn't really want to see. And for searches that are being diverted to a site that might pose a security risk it could make it much harder as the page would have to look interesting enough to get you to open it. So those with landing pages and using redirects to pages that most wouldn't go to if they knew what they were may now have a problem getting people to be lured into actually visiting a page. So while we don't know much the implications are interesting to speculate on. But one thing is certainly clear as always Google as is constantly working on innovative changes to online search.
Google is today testing a major new layout to their search results – full page previews of the target site and blue backgrounds behind the search results when you hover over them. Click the image below for a full size version.
One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results.
The size of the preview seems to be pretty much the full page although some longer pages are cropped at the bottom. You can click anywhere on the preview to take you directly to the site.
In addition to this they are now showing multiple results from the same site without indenting the results – see how myvouchercodes.co.uk has 1st and 2nd for the query above. This change follows a similar one they did in August Google to start showing more results from one particular site when users entered a brand related query.
Look how freelanceuk.com has 2nd & 3rd for the query above.
This new change is for non-brand queries as well. We have seen sites occupying 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th for some queries!
To be 100% clear – this is not a plugin. I’m using Google Chrome incognito mode with no plugins installed.
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