Hm...
Does this mean "Google ads" also get displayed more than "usual", due to the previews? Does it make a different to the bottom line?
Update: This story has been updated with comment from Google, and it has been clarfied to show that Google did tell webmasters when "Instant Previews" launched that it would be doing real-time fetches in some cases. We've also added stats concerning the fetches from The Register's site logs. Google's new "Instant Previews" …
I have to agree. It really is a truly irritating feature. It's far too sensitive to popping-up.
I'm not even sure what purpose it serves. The previews are too small to see anything, and I know what I'm looking for anyway, so why do I need a preview before I go there? Pointless and annoying.
I believe the purpose is to keep you on Google's search results page for longer, making it stickier and giving you more opportunity to look at their ads. Personally I find it incredibly annoying, but not as annoying as their "improved" image search results page.
I assume they still have ads on their results pages?
Completely massively hate it... a small low-res preview. You can fudge it's removal with AdBlock or Greasemonkey, but just give me an option on the search prefs page. Simple!
And some other stuff:
- The new Google Images results pages are abhorrent!
- Move the vertical search options pane down to the bottom of the page, so it doesn't take up my horizontal res.
- Disable location-based search so I can get a list of results that are unbiased by location, by default.
Funny how they won their market by creating plain simple search results pages, now they're forcing all this pap on people.
Still not going to stoop to using Yahoo, Bing, A9, Ask though... Google's search algorithm is still the best.
The Google Web Preview user-agent (masquerading as a Safari browser) is only used when there are robots.txt restrictions in place blocking images etc - it only exists to bypass those restrictions.
That way Google can continue to claim that Googlebot honours the Robots Exclusion Protocol and look squeaky clean.
No wonder they didn't announce it in advance.
I use Google and I've noticed this miniature preview pop up. To what point, exactly. It is too small to see anything other than "oh, okay, it's supposed to look like that, huh?". Perhaps if the preview was to do something useful like "loading... oh s**t, we've just been infected by a hidden IFrame, suggest you DON'T click follow this link" then I might see a purpose to it.
Otherwise, I'm sorry Google. It just seems to me that you've added a "cool feature" more or less "because you can".
Yes, very interesting copycat feature from the old Ask search engine...big deal.
More importantly, what's the reason Google continues to play chicken with anti-trust regulators and browser-sniff for Opera users and block them from Google Instant and this preview feature...?
Just asking...
I hate the new "features" Google keep adding. They're getting in the way of actually searching the web.
Instant Preview gets aroused far too easily - like a teenage boy seeing a nipple.
Instant Search isn't so bad if you're on a fast, unshared internet connection. But it's added bonus of changing the standard keyboard arrow keys from scrolling around the page to moving a little pointer is a right pain. At least you can turn this crap off, unlike the preview one.
Firefox with AdBlock Plus is required.
Press Shift-Ctrl-E to open the ABP settings. Add the following rules:
google.com###vspb
google.com##.vspi
google.com##.vspib
(and repeat for any local versions of Google you use, like .co.uk, .fr, etc)
Restart Firefox, and smile as that little magnifying glass and hyper-sensitive hyper-annoying popup have both vanished.
I'm now off to tweak my blog PHP to sniff the preview and return a black page with large white text that reads "SAY NO TO GOOGLE PREVIEW". Why? Because it's taking my bandwidth for no useful purpose, it isn't like the (potential) visitor can actually read it without going to my site... and... um... fetching it all over again...