These search engine features from Google will change the search landscape in 2011. Make sure your photography website looks good in Google Instant Preview and you show up in Google Social Search and Google Places.

Google Instant Preview

Google announced it’s instant preview function on its blog:

With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn’t stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Over time we’ve made steady improvements to our search results and snippets to help you pick a great page. Now we’re making a leap to image-based snapshots—a new kind of visual search result we call “Instant Previews” which makes it even faster to choose the right result.

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. Here’s a video showing Instant Previews in action:

Instant preview allows users to look at a site before clicking on it. One more barrier to click through on search results if you’re site shows poorly. Type site:yoursite.com into Google to see what your results look like. It may not be pretty if you have a Flash site.

Google Social Search

In addition to natural Google search results, you might see custom results from your social circle. For example a Google images search result may also return images from the people you are connected to in Flickr, Picassa, Twitter, or Gmail.

The big news here is that other users may see your images or your content in their search results if they are connected to you. And they don’t have to be directly connected to you. They can be Kevin Bacon and still probably see your stuff. Cool thing is that as a user I am more likely to click on results from my social circle because these are people I know and trust.

Get into the social circle of your friends’ searches with a Google Profile. One reason to set this up now is so that someone else doesn’t snatch google.com/profiles/yourname!

Google Place Search

Place Search is a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places.Google has clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. If a person searches San Francisco photographer, with Place Search here’s what you’ll get:

The new results are marked with red pins, and each one is a unique restaurant with relevant information and links from across the web, like user reviews and photos. Now information is grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.

More from the Google Blog.

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