Last year, Google rolled out a feature called “Google Instant Previews“. It  displays instant previews to users for search results. Though some found it to be an annoyance, others found it to be a useful way of finding relevant websites for their searches. Below, you can see an example of the instant preview in action.

As you can see, besides the normal list of search results, you can click on the magnifying glass and get a full page preview. This makes it pretty easy to assess whether the site you are looking at is relevant before you waste time loading up the page full screen.

Today, it appears that Google is experimenting with a redesign of instant previews. Below, you can see the results we got when we did a search for Techie Buzz on Google. Notice the arrows on the right side of the search result. In the previous picture, above, there was a magnifying glass that you could click on to toggle the previews on and off. It now appears to have been replaced by the gray arrows. If you move your mouse over the search results the double arrows will appear on the right side of the results.

Functionally, everything appears to be the same as before. One exception, however, there is now an “x” in the upper right corner that will allow you to close the preview. Below, you can see an image of how the preview appears when you click the arrows.

The preview comes up on the right side of the page. Notice that  the orange highlighted area still shows up to emphasize the area of the page that contains information relevant to your search criteria.

At the time of this writing, this new design was only showing up in Firefox on my PC; however, others here at Techie Buzz were able to get it in Chrome. It is unclear at this time whether this is an experiment, or if this new design will be released permanently. We will keep you posted as we find out more.