Google Instant Pages: An Impressive & Speedy Addition To Google Search

Google’s company-wide focus on speed has manifested itself today with another feature that makes the search experience faster. It’s called Instant Pages, and from watching the demo today, it’s an impressive addition to the Google search experience. Instant Pages is one of the many announcements that came from Google’s “Inside Search” event.

How Google Instant Pages Works

With Instant Pages, Google will pre-load the first search result when it’s confident that the user will click on it. The pre-load isn’t just for the base HTML file; Google downloads all images and external resources, and even executes javascript before the user clicks on the search result.

As Google’s Alex Komoroske explained, “There’s no waiting for text or images to load; they’re just there.”

During the event today, Google ran several sample queries with two browser windows open — one with Instant Pages enabled and one without. In each case, the browser with Instant Pages displayed the search result several seconds faster. You can see some examples of the comparison in this Google video.

Instant Pages work whether you’re logged in to a Google account or not.

Google’s Amit Singhal says that, in the company’s testing, Instant Pages saves users about 2-5 seconds per search by immediately getting them to the page they click on and not making them wait for the page to load.

How & When Do I Get Instant Pages?

Instant Pages, at least out of the gate, is a nice promotional feature for Google’s Chrome browser because that’s the only way to access it right now. Here’s the rundown of when and where it’ll be available:

• Available today in Chrome developer version
• Available this week in Chrome beta
• Available in coming weeks on Chrome stable version
• Available in coming weeks on mobile devices

Google did mention that the code for Instant Pages is open-source, and other browsers are able to incorporate it into their software if they want.

Postscript: There are a few more details on the Google Webmaster Central blog, where Google says the pre-loading of web pages won’t impact how search traffic is measured in Webmaster Tools. Also, a post on the Chromium blog explains how to detect if your pages are being pre-rendered.