Page Preview added to Google Search Options

Google has added a new option to its search toolbelt called Page Preview which was recently noticed by its Operating System. When the user searches for a particular topic on Google’s search page and clicks on ‘search options,’ the ‘page preview’ tool will be displayed at the left hand side of the webpage. A longer snippet and a thumbnail will be displayed for each and every search result if the user clicks on the ‘page preview’ button.

A small problem is that the Google thumbnails form a relatively small part of the webpage and are not really useful all the time to the user. Also, the thumbnails from the search results pages are always merged together, hence it takes a long time for the resulting image to load.

For example, if you search for information on U2, then all the search results will be displayed and the ‘page preview’ button can be found on the left hand side as an option under Standard view. If you click on this button, the thumbnails for that particular search result will be displayed directly on the search results page itself as a small column.

Page Previews is not a new concept at all to the search industry. It has been done before by Ask.com with the binoculars tool and has been in use for quite some time now. Another problem while using the Page Preview option of Google is that there are many Firefox add-ons that add many page previews to the search results displayed on Google webpage.

To summarize, there is nothing new and innovative about the new ‘Page Preview’ option of Google Search. It merely helps you to visualize thumbnails of each individual search result which opens as a small window and hence is not very helpful to the user.

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