Patrick Altoft reports seeing full page previews with a magnifying glass in the Google search results, as to others. It’s not their imaginations. Google has confirmed with us this is an experiment it’s testing.

Here is a screen shot:

Google has offered page previews as a search option for a while. But not on by default.

Ask.com was one of the first to offer this in the form of binoculars and Microsoft Bing also has a similar feature.

Google has confirmed to us that this is an experiment but had no further specific comment, as is often the case when it runs experiments. Google said generally:

“At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.”

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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