Video Previews in Google Search

video preview

This is nice. You can watch short previews of videos in Google search results itself by simply hovering your mouse over the magnifying glass icon. The video previews include the audio as well though it is turned off by default so as not to surprise your colleague who maybe working in an adjoining cubicle.

If you want to give this feature a try, search for a topic – lady gaga for example – where Google is likely to include videos in search results. The video is split into four roughly equal segments and each of the previews are about five seconds long.

Video Previews in Google are not working?

Google rolled out the video preview feature a few weeks ago but if you are still getting image thumbnails in search results instead of video previews, that’s probably because you are not using the US edition of Google – switch through google.com/ncr to enable video previews.

Watch this quick screencast to see the video preview feature in action:

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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