Another day, another test by the Googleplex it seems - this time a pop-up window in search results to show users a preview of each website.
Spotted by Patrick Altoft, director of search at UK-based digital agency Branded3, search results showed a small magnifying glass next to each entry.
Click on the magnifying glass and a large window appears with a preview of the featured web page.
The example above (courtesy of Altoft, with Google Instant switched on) shows a search page for "flights" with a preview of lastminute.com.
Google has truncated the length of the page with a tear-page, presumably because the site layout is reasonably long.
Another example Altoft found for UK fitness centres also featured another box within the window, this time highlighting keywords relevant to the search results.
As always on these occasions, Google says it carries out tests of different functionality across its network - as yet there is no official blog post about the preview window.
There is no indication as yet where the previews are being pulled from, but presumably from a recently cached version of the site - something Google is able to do much better these days since the launch of Chrome.
So, some quick points to mull over:
- First impression is everything. If a website looks, well, poorly designed or simply visually unappealing then that may well effect the likelihood of a click by the user.
- Site design will perhaps need to look good in preview form.
- The preview window sometimes (depending on the width of the site) covers pay-per-click advertising results!