Google’s Mobile Search Results Now Have 6-Second Video Previews

Google has recently revealed that it has rolled out a new big update to its mobile search results pages. Whenever a particular video is included in the query results, the search giant will now also display a six second preview clip so that the user can decide better to check out the video or leave it alone.

The good news is that Google has made sure to have the update work on most of all video content found on the Internet, including of course, its own YouTube. As explained by Emily Moxley, the director of product management for this project at Google, to TechCrunch, any video posted on the Internet is actually qualified for inclusion in the six second video preview. But not all previews will show simply because Google’s servers will still take some time to actually generate the said previews.

It goes without saying that videos from the Internet are as popular a source of information (and of course,  entertainment) as ever before, but they are not exactly as easy to preview -- sure, thumbnails do give some idea, but they may not be as good a representative of the complete content as video creators hope they are, despite the fact that some content providers have since mastered the art of choosing the right thumbnail to attract the most number of viewers. 

This is why a six second preview is so much better than just a mere thumbnail. Still, a preview is not that easy to figure out, too. Which part of the video exactly do you feature in those six seconds in order to give the best idea of what the video is really all about? For Google, it has chosen to acquire the assistance of machine learning. Basically what happens is that the search giant’s algorithm examines the whole video and chooses the best six second segment to serve as the search result preview. 

By the way, it is worth mentioning that the six second previews do not feature any ads. Moreover, they will only play when the user is connected to a Wi-Fi network. Also, users are free to deactivate video previews on mobile networks, too, or even disable the whole thing altogether by going to settings for both the Google app and Google Chrome for Android. Lastly, the six second previews for video search results are only made available on mobile for now, both via the Google app and in Google Chrome.