Announcing Instant Pages

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Earlier today we
announced Instant Pages,
a new feature to help users get to their desired search results even faster—in some cases
even instantly! The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are
building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we’re very confident
about which result is the best answer for the user’s search.

This prerendering technology is currently in the Chrome Dev Channel and will be going to Beta
later this week.

You can see Instant Pages in action in this video:

At Google we’re obsessed with speed. We’ve seen time and time again how an increase in apparent
speed leads to a direct
increase in user happiness and engagement.
Instant Pages helps visitors arrive at your site faster. When we trigger Instant Pages for your
site, users can start interacting with your site almost immediately, without having to wait for
text and images to load. We’ll only trigger Instant Pages when we have very high confidence that
your site is the exact result users are looking for. Search traffic will be measured in Webmaster
Tools just like before this feature, with only results the user visited counted. We’ll take the
time this summer before the feature launches in stable versions of Chrome to collect your
feedback.

The vast majority of sites will automatically work correctly when prerendered in Chrome. Check
out the
prerendering post on the Chromium blog
if you want to learn more about how prerendering works in Chrome or how you can detect that your
site is being prerendered.

Written by
Ziga Mahkovec,
Software Engineer