Official: Google Testing Default Page Previews With Magnifying Glass

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.”