

Google Instant Pages - tilt
http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/14/google-announces-instant-pages-delivers-common-result-pages-instantly/

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antimatter15
If this feature is Google-specific, as in, it only operates on google results
(by something within the Chrome code), then I think this represents a profound
change in the generally content-neutral view of websites, and gives them an
unfair competitive advantage which may pose regulatory issues.

Edit:

Okay, it seems to be part of a new HTML API (
<http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html> ). Just add the
tag:

<link rel=prerender href=somewebsite> and it'll render and fetch a page in the
background so navigation to it will be fast.

Also, apparently prerendering automatically aborts whenever plugins are found
on the page, so this may be bad since many slow web pages are slow because of
the use of Flash.

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tonfa
The announcement ([http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/knocking-down-
barrier...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/knocking-down-barriers-to-
knowledge.html)) says it uses a feature available in the next chrome beta (see
here for the technical details: [http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/prerende...](http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/prerender)).

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rsoto
Wasn't pre-caching already on Firefox?
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ>

I remember this had its controversy quite some time ago. I'm glad Chrome is
taking it seriously, but I wonder what happened with the old implementation.

(Note that the markup was <link rel="prefetch"> and now is <link
rel="prerender">)

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macrael
It seems like a significant shift for Google to be releasing major search
features as Chrome exclusives. I think they did this before with the personal
blacklist feature which was eventually put into the web UI. (Can anyone fact
check that for me? I never used that feature.) Should be interesting to see if
this is the start of a trend. I know I'll probably switch to Chrome eventually
if that becomes the only way to get the full Google experience.

~~~
bdonlan
This isn't a search feature; it's a browser feature. There's no real way for
them to implement this in a cross-browser way; they could load a hidden iframe
for the first result, but it looks like they're actually rendering it in the
background, not just pre-caching it, so it wouldn't have as much of an effect.
Other browsers could probably implement this just as well, eventually.

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togasystems
This looks awesome. Quick question, what happens when I do not look at the
page in respect to ad impressions?

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bigethan
It's not actually loaded, it's prerendered. The rough details are here:
<http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/prerendering-in-chrome.html>

The salient bit seems to be: "The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and
does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site
simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks."

I'm not sure if impression tracking gifs would be loaded (I'd hope not), but
it doesn't seem to run any of the JS.

~~~
dave1010uk
I imagine this as Chrome middle-clicking on links Google thinks you may want
to see. They're opened in an invisible tab that replaces the current one if
you click the link.

Just as Google Instant made AdWords more confusing, it sounds like link
prerendering will affect all sorts of analytics.

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Zakuzaa
If(CTR_of(resutxyz)>80%)) pre_render(sitexyz);

