Just weeks after changing the way we search in a web browser and rolling out Instant Search, Google is at it once again. Today, according to Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm, Google is testing full page previews and blue backgrounds on hovered over search results. In page preview mode, a thumbnail of a website is displayed to its corresponding result entry. In the preview, certain areas of text are highlighted that are relevant to your search criteria. It is a full page preview, with only some large sites cropped off at the bottom. Clicking anywhere in the image will bring you to the site.
Image Credit: Blogstorm
Many have been unable to reproduce this. Including myself, but sites like the TheNextWeb are reporting that this is indeed happening, so this likely isn’t a hoax. This is different than the thumbnail previews that Google introduced a year ago as a search option (available in the left hand options bar). This iteration of the page preview shows a full size representation of the site with more detail and visibility.
Surprisingly, and this may be a bug (it’s in testing, after all), but it seems that people, like Atloft, who are able to access the functionality are reporting that Google has stopped indenting results from the same page, as you can see in the first few results in the above image. That doesn’t seem like the most efficient “innovation” Google could come up with, and will likely be resolved soon.