However, this may have let Google into some hot water, with their latest venture into the world of social media coming under renewed fire in the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust probe, according to news reports.

Apparently, the FTC will be looking into Google which is said to be exploiting its undisputed lead in the search market, in favour of their own product. Google Plus is a site that is believed by many to be the most capable contender to challenge Facebook’s domination in the social media market.

Google Plus, which was launched last year and is seen as an amalgam of both Facebook and Twitter, as the site blends many of both those two platforms’ features together, with its own unique offerings, has already hit over sixty million users so far. Yet given the less-than-flattering feedback from these users, a platform that can compete with Facebook may take some time to achieve.

What does this mean for privacy?

Google Plus cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (The feature will only be present for those who have and are signed into a Google Plus account). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.

The new format and features will also likely cause Google to come under renewed fire that it is leveraging its search engine to favour its own content and crowd out competitors. However, this debate will no doubt roll on for a while to come.

To summarize, personalised results include:

• Listings from the web

• Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behaviour

• Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections

• Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)

• Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

The last line is the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web.

Is any of this important to me?

Well, it could be if you’re a marketer. As we mentioned, the platform now has over 60m users, true many of them are probably dormant accounts, but with Google seemingly favouring/pushing/self-promoting Google plus results, how long do you think it will be before marketers/SEOs/inbound marketers or whatever you wish to call them take Google Plus serious?

I don’t think Google would be spending time promoting this product if it didn’t have legs, so ignore it at your peril. Personally I won’t take the chance on missing out, so I’ll certainly be using it on a regular basis and once the platform matures, I’ll make my assumptions on its success then.

Google has currently released information that searchers using the new Google Instant Preview are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the search results they click after seeing a visual preview next to the listing.

The basic idea of Google Instant Preview is to essentially give users the ability to see a website before they visit it. It does this by taking a screenshot of every webpage in its index and giving users access to it via a magnifying glass icon that sits to the right of every search result. When a user clicks on the magnifying glass icon, a screenshot of the webpage in question will appear to the right of the search result listing.

“We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load”

Commented the Product Manager in the Google Blog.

He added

“With Google Instant Preview, we match a search query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customised to your search–usually in under one-tenth of a second.”

When a searcher performs a search and sees the search results page displayed, they do have a choice of whether or not to activate the Google Instant Preview feature by clicking on the magnifying glass icon. Therefore, it will probably be more beneficial to have a well-designed and well-structured website that previews well. Reason being is that if a website looks unprofessional or out dated on the preview, you could find searchers avoid clicking on it as opposed to clicking on a website that DOES look professional and modern in its preview. Again, as mentioned in other topics, it boils down to trust and how users see a professional website more trusting than ones that look unprofessional.

Google Instant Preview is here to stay and designed to make the search selection process easier and according to Google, faster, but the bottom line is good SEO practices are what is going make the difference of whether or not you get discovered on the search engine results pages and this has always been the case. Meaning the introduction of the Instant Preview tool should not affect organic SEO much if at all.

For more information on organic SEO techniques contact us today and see how your website can get discovered on page 1 of Google and let users start Instant Previewing your site today.