The search engine giant Google is unveiling a new feature designed to make searches faster than ever before.
Google enjoys being the number one search engine in the world but they also understand that constant evolution and adaption is necessary to stay that way. However, does this new feature really appeal to users?
Google Instant Pages essentially guesses what sites a user will want to visit and loads them in the background. If the user chooses to click on one of the preloaded links the page will load much faster since it’s already in the browser’s cache.
Instant Pages only shaves off a few seconds at best, yet Google is very confident that users will appreciate the feature, so much that they are already integrating this feature into future updates of their popular Chrome browser.
Pre-rendering pages isn’t new and Chrome’s rival browser Firefox has had a pre-fetching feature available for a long time now. Google’s implementation of the feature is better and more elegant in the fact that instead of blindly pre-fetching all outbound links on a page Google can make an educated guess and the guesses are surprisingly accurate.
The pre-fetching feature doesn’t noticeably slow the browser speed and it does streamline browsing substantially. Google Instant Pages is only one of several new features that the search engine giant has rolled out in recent months but this pre-fetching feature is by far the most useful new tool to date.
Google Instant Pages is an excellent follow up to Google Instant which automatically brings up potential search engine results as users type.
Google wasn’t willing to divulge exactly how their new pre-fetching feature decides which pages to load in the background; all Google was really willing to share was that they have been working on this new technology for years.
Google Instant Pages will become available for Chrome later this week but it won’t be available for other browsers in the foreseeable future; Google is clearly hoping to attract more users to their Chrome browser.