Adds Flash support and a New Webmaster Tool to Instant Previews

Instant Previews were introduced late last year to allow users to preview sites in a small window before clicking the link in the search results. This month Google has decided to add Flash support and a new Webmaster Tool to their Instant Preview feature.

Flash Support...
Before when you tried to preview a site with flash there would be a puzzle piece icon where the flash segment of the site would normally show up if you were actually viewing the site in the browser. Now, with the addition of flash support your flash heavy site is also available for users to preview.

Like all things flash - there are still a few bugs to be worked out. Sometimes Google has to create an "on-demand preview" of your page and might not be able to create a proper preview. In this case the preview will show users the same message your browser shows when it doesn't support Flash.

Google has some tips to help you get flash working on your site preview, and to improve your chances of having a good on-demand preview:

• Be sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash. This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can't view Flash. Providing a good experience for this case will improve your preview and make your visitors happier.
• If Flash components are rendering but appear as loading screens instead of actual content, try reducing the loading time for the component. This makes it more likely we'll render it properly.
• If you have Flash videos on your site, consider submitting a Video Sitemap which helps us to generate thumbnails for your videos in Instant Previews.
• If most of the page is rendering properly but you still see puzzle pieces appearing for some smaller components, these may be fixed in future crawls of your page.

Instant Preview Tool...
To make the job of trouble shooting those Instant Previews, Google has released a cool new tool to Webmaster Tools' Labs section. The idea of the tool is that it allows you to compare your live Web page to Google's...