I'm in agreement with you here Michael. I am not to impressed with this upgrade. From a paid search perspective, when searchers open up the 'preview' it blocks many of the ads that appear on the right hand side of SERPs.

I've been keeping an eye on CTR over the past week and have seen a small decrease across the board because of this.

I feel a bit better after reading your post. This is one of those features I really don't like for a couple of reasons. First we don't know how often they will update the thumbnail and second it can potentially reduce conversions. If you run on site specials there's no way to get that message through with such a tiny snippet.
Likewise our CTR is down a bit this week.

I think the innovation is okay. It intends to enhanced the users experience. Users are really after an answer, not on keywords.

Good morning.

I think the biggest issue we have to wrestle with is "Is this problematic for everyone, or just problematic for marketers?"

There are changes Google makes that does make the end user happier. For example, as much as some of us were stung by the Google affiliate slap some years back, it saved AdWords from being cluttered with direct linking garbage.

As for the "preview" update, it might help users screen out spammy sites and sites with errors before looking. Plus, if have a specific site you forgot the URL for and want to quickly verify, you can do it quicker with this feature.

--Dan

I have seen this change and there are instances that I find it annoying, or I was just caught unprepared with the preview popping up the screen. But this helps viewers sort which sites are interesting to look at.

I agree. I am often puzzled about the innovations that Google launches. It also launched Google instants recently, where search results start to appear as the user is typing their search query.
I think they said this would save users about a second for each search.
Are we really so time-poor that we need to save 1 second on each search query we run?
It seemed an odd use of resource, when Facebook is pushing out more substantial innovations.

The key statement you brought up have we gotten this lazy, l have reviewed this feature and l strongly feel it has eliminated our ability to concentrate and search by clicking instead of doing our own research.

with Justin statement regarding a drop on his CTR, l have not really notice much of a decrease, but then again l have not paid close attention to his findings.

Thanks for sharing this article with us all Michael.

All the Best

I'm actually going to disagree with you, Michael. I think the Google Preview feature is actually helpful. You can get a sense for if a site is a spammy site or a useful site just by Previewing it, without having to click through to it. Additionally, nothing that Google roles out hasn't already been extensively tested. They always test on a limited basis before rolling something out full scale. So they had to have known that their users would like it more often than not. They probably know this by the fact that they see people using the Preview function a lot.

For me I love the Google preview, when I'm trying to search for a website I'm to check how well the website designed and content is because it reflects the services they offer. If it's high quality it means it's a big company so for Online Marketing it affect a lot.

I don't mind those previews, really. But I came to find out that they tend to work better with Google's Chrome browser... My IT mates say that some bugs accrue when you use Microsoft's browser, and I wonder: Since there is this silent war between Google and MS, aren't those previews yet another method of fighting between those two gigants?

Hi, interesting read..I've been thinking more or less the same thing, what's the point in some of these features?! I just presume people would click through quickly and check out sites for themselves...? Thanks for the blog.

Agreed... Has it seemed like Google is making a bunch of little tweaks that are supposed to save milliseconds lately? It's like a cat playing the mouse because they can.

I am going to have to disagree with you on this just because I think it is nice to have a glimpse of the page you are about to view before you actually view it so you can skim through results faster.