For more than two years, Google (News - Alert) has offered its Instant Preview feature, to allow users to see a brief glimpse of a webpage before it is selected. Fans of the instant preview may be losing this option in the near future, as the idea of dropping this in favor of a new drop-down menu is being toyed with.

A spokesman from Google told TechCrunch, “We’re constantly making changes to the layout and features of the search results page.” With this being said, it looks like the Instant Preview option will be gone. 

The three options that the dropdown feature will include are “Cached”, “Similar”, and “Share.” Many sources have cited the “clean” and “clutter-free” look of the new option. “Share”, of course, is only useful to users of Google Plus, which still has a mixed reception. More users will find use in the “Similar” function, which displays similar search results and the “Cached” function, which will take users to the cached page of a given website.

According to the Google Operating System blog, the new dropdown feature may have been inspired by its competitor, Bing, which offers a similar feature. Whether or not Google has any more plans to try to compete with superior Bing functions, like their image search, which, by many accounts, is far more advanced than Google Image Search is unclear, but their copycat dropdown menu may be a sign of things to come, which would prove useful to anyone who searches for images through Google, out of force of habit, which, to many people, is the only excuse for doing so.

The Next Web also reported that Google had confirmed the elimination of instant previews as part of a test, and it may or not be a permanent change. Should this change become a permanent feature, instead of just a test, many Google users will not be happy about losing this popular feature. Whether or not these changes will make searching easier or more difficult for users, only the test will tell.