Last November Google launched its Instant Previews feature for search results. The quick skinny is that there is a magnifying glass graphic in the search results. When you click on it you are shown a pop-up visual miniature representation of the web page so you can get a sense of what’s at the destination before visiting the page.
It’s a nice feature and I can see this coming in very handy for the times you find a great site, don’t bookmark it, then search again to go back to it at a later date. Instead of visiting site after site until you find it, you can use Google Previews to quickly preview sites without having to load each page. Since you’ve been to the page before you’ll likely recognize it when you see it in the Preview.
And now the bad news
Unfortunately, as of now, it doesn’t support many rich media format content types. Embedded Flash, Silverlight, Java Applets, and video files (FLV, MOV, MP4) are rendered as blank spaces on the page or represented by a gray box with a puzzle piece in the center.
For Flash, the immediate solution that comes to mind is to offer a non-Flash alternative (as many sites already do). No dice. The Google Preview (bot?) doesn’t display the replacement content. Check out http://www.google.com/search?q=%22SWFObject+2+dynamic+publishing+example+page%22 to view examples. Google employee, John Mueller, has posted that Google is working on this but there is no projected date for a solution.
It’s something to consider for sites that are heavily dependent on Google searches for traffic.
