After watching E3, Computex and WWDC hog the headlines for the past few weeks, Google reminded digerati journalists that they were still, you know, one of the biggest freakin' companies in the world at the "Instant Search" event in San Francisco today. The party's barely underway and the Goog's already announced three majorly nifty features coming soon to a search engine near you.
Google has unveiled yet another major search enhancement, exactly two months after the world was introduced to Instant Search. The new feature Google is calling Instant Previews makes choosing the most relevant search result easier by providing users with a graphical overview of each page. The feature can be activated by clicking once on the magnifying glass icon next to any one of the search results. Page previews change just as the cursor hovers over different search results.
“In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit,” Raj Krishnan, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post.
“We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load. With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under one-tenth of a second.”
However, the latest Dev channel release, version 7.0.536.2, is a lot different and boasts a large number of enhancements, including built-in Google Instant search results, WebGL 3D support, and support for accelerated composting and 3D CSS transforms. The release also addresses a number of issues with previous versions.
“A lot of the work that's being done in 7.0 is largely not user facing and in some cases is a legitimate work in progress. With our new release cycle and about:labs, I'd suggest you stay tuned, things are going to start moving quite fast,” Anthony Laforge, Google Chrome product manager, told unimpressed comment posters on the Google Chrome Releases blog.