In addition to some recent changes to the look and feel of search, today we’re making it even easier to see Instant Previews of your search results. Sometimes you’re searching for a page with a specific type of visual – like a seating chart when you want to buy baseball tickets – but can’t tell from the results page which one will have exactly what you’re looking for. Or you’ve already seen a specific page and would recognize it in an instant if you saw it again. You can now quickly glance at a preview of the page without having to click and see if it’s the page you want.

Instant Previews have been around since last year, allowing you to click on the magnifying glass to the right of the result to see a visual overview of a page. Now these previews are no longer even a click away: if you move your mouse over a search result, arrows will appear. Hover over them to see a visual preview of that result.

Earlier this year, Google launched Instant Previews for mobile:

Then Google later added Flash support in Instant Previews.

Think about things like checking into a hotel or a flight, checking on a flight status, booking a flight, renting a car, etc.

“Now when you search across 7 popular categories – including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels – you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task,” explains Bing Program Manager Deepak Vijaywargi.

“Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision,” says Vijaywargi. ”For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.”

Bing pitches the feature as an extension of its deep link inclusion on search results, but I’d say this is probably one of the most interesting things Bing has done with its results in a while. Bing has always positioned itself as wanting to get you the answers and get things done as quickly as possible, and this should, in theory at least, help with that.

It will be interesting to see if Google borrow’s the idea.

“We have been working to unify the search experiences across web, multimedia, and vertical search results pages with a design that is clean and intuitive,” says Yahoo’s search team.

The features of the redesign include a “cleaner and simpler” look, automatic tabs, which appear below the search box to show you specialized content for other verticals (images, video, sports, etc.), and filters on the left side, which may remind you of Bing and Google.

Here are some screen shots:

Yahoo has also made some new additions to image search. There is now a larger pool of Facebook images included (which come from public profiles and fan page), a richer “latest” pictures experience, and better recommendations at the end of galleries.

Are the search engines headed in the right direction? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Cutts on Why Your PageRank Would Drop

While not exactly an announcement, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts did post a video discussing reasons why Google Toolbar PageRank would drop. We talked about this a little bit more here, but you can hear exactly what he had to say in this video:

There is a part in there where he mentions that if you were caught selling links, but have stopped and want to earn Google’s trust back, you should submit a reconsideration request. On that note, Google announced that it is getting “more transparent” with its reconsideration requests.

Better Communication

“Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request,” explain Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality team in a joint blog post. “Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.”

“If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well,” they add. “Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”

Google says it’s not able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but that now webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and will know the outcome of the reconsideration review.

Google Using Blocked Site Data in Algorithm

Earlier this year, Google announced some new domain blocking features, which included a browser extension, and a link next to search results, which allow users to block sites that they don’t like. This was part of Google’s big quality clean up initiative, which also includes the Panda update and the +1 button. Initially, the sites blocked were on a personalized basis, but that is no longer completely the case. Google search quality engineer Johannes Henkel is quoted as saying, “We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”

Pagination and View-All in Search Results

Google is “making a larger effort” to return single-page versions of content in search results, when the content is broken up among multiple pages. Think multiple page articles and content slideshows. Google says users tend to prefer single page versions of content, but sometimes these can load slowly, so there are also times when the multiple pages work better.

“So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience,” Google indexing team software engineers Benjia Li & Joachim Kupke say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog.

You can read more about the technical specs here. They summarize it all nicely: “Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do.”

To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, if a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results.

They talk even more about the specs of using rel=”next” and rel=”rev” in this post.

Rich Snippets for Apps

Google is also showing rich snippets for apps in search results now. They’re getting info for these from various places including: Android Market, Apple iTunes and CNET.

“Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs,” says product manager Alejandro Goyen. “Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.”

That’s something to consider if your business has an app. It’s a reputation factor.

Editing in YouTube

This isn’t exactly a search feature, but when you consider how big a role video can play in search marketing and that YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s certainly worth your attention. YouTube has launched new editing tools that allow you to easy edit videos right from YouTube itself.

This should help you improve your videos, which are not only searchable on the second largest search engine and embeddable across the web, but often appear right in the results of regular Google searches. This new editing functionality will make it easier to try new things with less successful videos and potentially make them more viral.

Bing Adaptive Search

Ok, getting away from Google, Bing has launched adaptive search, which is essentially its version of personalized search. The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”

“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.”
 
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”

You’ve been dealing with this kind of thing with Google for quite some time, but it does throw in another SEO factor to consider for Bing, which as previously mentioned continues to gain market share.

WebProNews is interviewing Bing’s Stefan Weitz as I write this, so check back at WebProNews for more on this soon.

New Analytics Tool from Blekko

Finally, alternative search engine Blekko has released an interesting search analytics tool, which some of you might find useful. It’s called “Web Grepper”.

“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of  targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”

Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.

These aren’t the only things going on in search this week, but these are some of the more noteworthy things that are likely to have a bigger impact on most site owners, than say things like Flight Search and Baseball scores.

Do any of these items concern you? Make your life easier? Let us know in the comments.

That’s not all though. Google has expanded its NFL-related search results to include even more information, thanks to a partnership with ESPN, which already expanded upon its MLB results.

In a message posted to Google’s Inside Search Blog, software engineer Itay Maman writes:

Just as the NFL season kicks off and you have your fantasy football league ready to go, you’ll be able to get useful information such as the latest scores, schedules, standings and stats for football-related queries in your search results. Last week, we started showing MLB results in partnership with ESPN and we’re now expanding sports live results to include the NFL. In addition to information on the football league, teams and players, you’ll also have direct links to previews, live streams, updates and game recaps. We hope to add more and more sports information on google.com, so stay tuned.

The first game of the season kicks off at 8:30 PM (Eastern) on Thursday, September 8 on NBC. The New Orleans Saints head to Lambeau to face the Green Bay Packers.

“Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give you a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to your query,” says product manager Raj Krishnan. “This week we started rolling out snippet improvements for pages that contain lists; results for these pages will now reflect the structure of the page, rather than just showing two lines of text.”

“If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we’ll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format,” he adds. “The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page (for example, “30+ items” in the screenshot below).”

Google says it will be rolling out the snippets globally over the next few days.

This is the second type of new snippet we’ve seen Google launch in the last week or so. They recently announced the launch of rich snippets for music, allowing webmeisters to markup pages using the music markup to allow search results to display song info in the snippet.

The feature launched with MySpace, Rhapsody and Reverbnation taking advantage.

Google says it will continue to improve snippets in different ways.

Now, sitelinks are full-sized blue text links with a URL and a single line of text underneath. There are also more of them. The old maximum number was 8. Now it’s 12.

But that’s not all. How Google actually determines which links to show has also changed.

“In addition, we’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links,” explains Daniel Rocha, a software engineer on Google’s sitelinks team. “This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page.”

“Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them,” he adds. “The number of sitelinks will also vary based on your query.”

While some users may have seen this feature in tests prior to this point, Google says it is rolling out the updates over the next few days around the globe in all supported languages to modern browser users (Chrome, Firefox, IE7 and above, etc.).

This was first reported by Alex Chitu at Google Operating System, working off a tip from David from Making Money with Android. It appears that even within the test, you users aren’t seeing this happen for every result.

According to Chitu, “David, who noticed this change, says that he searched for [madvertise] and ‘most of the results looked normal, with the website title, snippet and URL. However, two search results displayed the website name instead of the URL.’”

We’re still waiting to hear back from Google on plans for this feature and/or the extent of its testing.

As a user, I’m not sure this change would be an improvement. If you can see the domain name, you can tell what the site is, and sometimes the structure of the URL itself can give you an idea of what kind of page you’re actually going to be landing on, particularly if the result comes from a site that you’re familiar with.

I’ll be surprised if Google turns this into the norm for all search results, but it will be interesting to see if they roll it out on a broader basis .

It’s clear that as a general rule, people will complain when sites are redesigned. Some redesigns draw more criticism than others, and this would be just a minor adjustment to Google’s current design (which was broadly redesigned in the last year or two, and to plenty of criticism). Still, I can’t say I’ve ever seen anybody complain that Google shows URLs in search results, and I’d bet that some will complain if they’re removed.

What do you think? Should Google change the URLs to site names?

Update: A reader points to a similar test in Italy, where Google is testing both the URL and the site name together, which makes more sense in my opinion. Read the comments below.

Place Search results are marked with red pins, much like you’re used to seeing on Google Maps. 

Obviously, this is great news for local businesses, or at least the ones that are optimized for local search. For those who aren’t, this would appear to symbolize a crucial time to starting placing more focus on this area. 

"We’ve made results like this possible by developing technology to better understand places," explains Product Manager Jackie Bavaro. "With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names (‘stubb’s bbq’ is the same as ‘stubbs bar-b-que’)."

"One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place," adds Bavaro. "In our new layout you’ll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you’ll get to the sites you’re looking for with just one search. In our testing Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information."

If Google uses location info from mobile devices along with this, it could make mobile search much more powerful and useful by simply saving time. Usually, when you’re on the go, anything that saves time is helpful. 

The feature is only starting to roll out, so if you don’t have access to it just yet, you can check it out here.

Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm spotted the test, providing the screenshot below and saying, "One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results."

Do you think this feature will make a good site design more critical? Share your thoughts.

 

Image credit: Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm

It’s worth noting, as Altoft points out, that not all previews display the full page, as some longer pages are cut off at the bottom. 

While this may not be a widely released feature yet (and it’s possible that it won’t be), it’s interesting to see just how much Google has changed the search experience this year, just from the desktop. In the Spring, Google rolled out the left panel navigation. More recently, they introduced Google Instant. Those are the major changes, though there have been other smaller ones sprinkled in among them.

That doesn’t include the ways Google is changing the way we search on mobile devices with things like Voice Search and Google Goggles (not to mention Google TV). 

If the preview feature goes on to become a full-fledged feature, I’m going to have to consider that a major one. This could dramatically affect clickthroughs, for better or for worse. We’ll really get to see how big a part web design plays in conversions at that point. It’s conceivable that consumers will be drawn even more to well-known brands and familiar layouts. 

Late last year, Google released a tool called Browser Size that shows you how others view your site. More specifically, it shows you the percentages of people that will see certain portions of your site without having to scroll. This shouldn’t really have much affect on the full-page previews in SERPs, but it can come in handy for when the user clicks through.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information on the preview feature. We’ll update when we get more info. 

Update: Google gave us the classic response: "At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog."

Are you concerned about what the feature will do to your clickthroughs? Comment here.