Seasoned Marketer

Today, Google released it’s newest feature to the Google Search engine which is the ability to preview a site before actually clicking on it.  If you hadn’t noticed, there is now a little magnifying glass at the end of each page title in the search engine.

When you click on that magnifying glass you’ll get a little pop up image on the right side of the page that shows you a preview of what the page looks like.

The idea behind this is to just skip the pages that might seem cluttered or junky or not relevant.  What’ll be interesting is to see how well this actually works.  And right now, for example, searching the “seasoned marketer” in Internet Explorer resulted in a image as shown below :

Click the maginfying glass next to each result to see preview

What’s interesting is that the preview image is actually at least a month old.  So new changes to the sites don’t seem to be updated.  That might have to do to crawl rate.  Am not sure.

Also when I loaded up the search in the Firefox browser, I didn’t see the magnifying glass and so it didn’t seem to be working.  Perhaps a bit of lag on the release?  Again not sure.

Now this brings up the idea of lower click through rates, but maybe better bounce rates as a result.  I can’t help to wonder if this will affect click through rates and consequently the ad income for Google Adsense users. 

The funny thing is that Google is typically so subtle in their approach.  For example, if you aren’t careful, you might miss that little magnifying glass and would have never even known that their was such a feature.

I don’t really know how much I’ll actually use it, maybe once I get used to it, but it’s nice to have options – in particular if it saves time.

Check it out when you get a chance.  I think it’ll give designers something else to pay attention to.  In fact I can see it now, there will be posts and maybe even courses on how to best optimize your preview image for best click through results.  Too funny.