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Ben Hollom – Marketing Director, M2 Bespoke
By Ben Hollom
Google continues to make changes to its search engine in a bid to improve the user experience and deliver better results. In an announcement on its Search Forums, the company said that it was removing its Instant Previews function, which was intended to give users a glimpse of a website by hovering the mouse over a magnifying glass next to the website in search results.
Google explained that the feature was removed due to low usage, despite Google´s efforts to optimise it in 2011. Instant Previews was introduced in 2010 and was later made available to mobile and video. However, since users did not seem to be interested in the options, they are all gone now.
Instead, Google is launching a new drop-down menu, which is accessible at the same place where the magnifying glass used to be, Search Engine Watch informed. The drop-down gives users the choice to view Cached results or Similar results or to Share a page on Google+. Previously, there was no Share option for search results available.
Google´s results page has been streamlined and this has led to the removal of certain features, including Instant Previews, the post on Google´s Search Forum said. As it was used by very few users on rare occasions, the company decided to concentrate on streamlining the page so that more users could benefit, thus making the feature redundant, it also explained.
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