Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 10:30 AM
Webmaster level: AllEarlier today we announced Instant Pages, a new feature to help users get to their desired search results even faster--in some cases even instantly! The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we're very confident about which result is the best answer for the user's search.
This prerendering technology is currently in the Chrome Dev Channel and will be going to Beta later this week.
You can see Instant Pages in action in this video:
At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've seen time and time again how an increase in apparent speed leads to a direct increase in user happiness and engagement. Instant Pages helps visitors arrive at your site faster. When we trigger Instant Pages for your site, users can start interacting with your site almost immediately, without having to wait for text and images to load. We'll only trigger Instant Pages when we have very high confidence that your site is the exact result users are looking for. Search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature, with only results the user visited counted. We'll take the time this summer before the feature launches in stable versions of Chrome to collect your feedback.
The vast majority of sites will automatically work correctly when prerendered in Chrome. Check out the prerendering post on the Chromium blog if you want to learn more about how prerendering works in Chrome or how you can detect that your site is being prerendered.
28 comments:
are there plans to extend these to other browsers
Will this be the default behavior or will there be an option for users to not to opt for pre-fetch, for eg., when using smartphones.
@indyank
Prerendering is only available in Chrome and not for smartphones. On the desktop, it will be enabled by default in upcoming releases, but you can turn it on/off by going to "Preferences -> Under the Hood -> Predict network actions to improve page load performance".
How will this affect analytics programs? Some questions that come to mind more specifically are: Theoretically if the page loads in the background for faster rendering would that not skew stats like time on site? Would the page loading in the background and the visitor clicking through count as 2 page views? Also, if a user does not click on your site since it loaded in the background would it be counted as a bounce and affect other metrics like conversion rate?
@Jason
The page visibility API can be used to account for views accurately. For more information, see the last two paragraphs of the post at http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/prerendering-in-chrome.html.
can I use the instant pages today? do I have to enable/disable it somewhwere?
@Richard Rox
You can get Instant Pages today by installing the developer channel of Chrome. It will come to Chrome beta channel soon, and subsequently, to stable Chrome.
Wow, you're good.
Is this Chrome specific ?
Is there a meta tag to prevent pre-caching?
this is great!
Very nice i am waiting... I am fed up of seeing loading pages
How about pre-loading results for the entire page?
Better yet - How about 's e p a r a t i n g' search results for websites and directories... much the same way is done with images and video.
I don't see how this is related to Webmasters (it's more of a Chrome feature), other than inflating traffic to our sites.
Feature is awesome, but in this demo I see here marketing manipulation because one is waiting some seconds with a click to let Chrome download page in background. That's why it have 0sec download time.
You might be obsessed with speed, but I am not. I'm about predictability and reliability. I do not want these features, therefore I've already gone into my current version of Chrome and disabled them. This is how you lose to Bing... One user at a time.
Firefox 4 with bing.
It is fantastic feature. Will it help heavy websites or Google will penalise slower websites more? I am looking to forward to experiment with my website http://seoeh.com/, to see how it will perform in Google Search with Instant Pages feature.
Matthew, it's not that Google are obsessed with speed. It's that they're all about the experience.
For the average person, not having to wait 5 seconds when they google something is a good thing. It's not (or shouldn't nb) a deal-breaker to anyone that uses Google or Chrome.
"At Google we're obsessed with speed"
RTFA
Jason did you get an answer how would this effect the analytics
My capacity to turn instant off has dissappeared - and I hate it. On my computer it is slow, it truncates my searches and so chucks up the wrong information, and wastes my time such that if I cant work without instant, I will no longer use Google for search. I know I am not alone... Google, your search market share will heamorhage away from day to day users like myself; you urgently need to review your technology and address these very real problems
ty googke
I mistype things I'm searching for, so I don't like instant search.
Would very much like a way to turn it off.
You can disable Google Instant by going to www.google.com/preferences
As others have mentioned while I love instant pages I am worried about the possible increase in bounce rates.
I own various sites which start with the same brand name. For example brand.com and brandexample.com someone visiting the second URL would create a bounce for the first.
I tried to make some investigation about Web Analytics, Pre-rendering and Instant Pages. This is the link
Instant Pages & Web Analytics
The article is in italian, but you can translate it with Google.
Thanks for sharing, please keep an update about this info. love to read it more. i like this site too much.
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