Recently, Google rolled out a few new features that change the way users interact with its search engine.

Many of you are already familiar with Instant Previews, which allows you to see an enlarged picture of every landing page in a SERP by simply hovering over the result. This functionality has been extended to mobile technology as well. More interestingly, Instant Previews have now been expanded to cover video search. Clicking the magnifying glass next to video search results will allow you to view short clips of the video in question. I could see how this could be a time-saver, as it can be a real pain to deal with loading times and pop-ups, etc. for what may be a wrong or disappointing video in the first place.

Likely in response to all the recent bad publicity surrounding their often-lacking search quality, Google is now allowing users to block search results from entire domains. This is so great. I can’t speak to the accuracy of what I’m about to say, but I would assume that this data will be used to assist in future algorithmic tweaks. After all, in a recent interview with Wired, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal revealed that user surveys were used in developing the “Panda” content farm algo update. If I was willing to have my search activity tracked, I imagine my informational searches would begin to look very different.