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EVDOinfo.com has long been your source for tips, tricks, hacks and suggestions for getting the most out of your EVDO service, and each week we will be highlighting a particularly interesting or popular topic in the "Tip of the Week" feature. To suggest future Tips of the Week, post your suggestions in the EVDO Forums.

Conserve Bandwidth - Don't Use Google Instant Previews

Google's search engine is used more often than any other by a large margin, so when Google makes a change to their service, it affects a lot of people! Unfortunately for 3G mobile broadband users who have a 5GB monthly allowance on their service, some of Google's recent "enhancements" to their search page use up a lot of extra data. In September we showed you how to disable Google's "Instant Search" feature to prevent Google from automatically searching for each letter and word you type into the search box (which results in a lot of extra data being transferred!), and today we'll show you how to avoid letting Google's new "Instant Previews" feature suck up your bandwidth, too.

Google's "Instant Previews" feature allows you to view a preview of the web pages in your search results without having to actually go to the website by clicking on the little magnifying glass next to any of the search results (circled in the picture below) and then hovering your mouse over the result. This can be convenient if you want to take a peak at a site before clicking on it, but it does use extra bandwidth - each preview Google loads averages about 20KB! And once you click the magnifying glass to look at ONE preview, the preview function remains on, and a preview will load for each search result you mouse over. This means you could use up to 200KB of data just by scanning through the previews on ONE page of Google search results!

If your mobile broadband plan includes the standard 5GB allowance, we recommend NOT using Google's Instant Previews feature. If you do turn it on, make sure to click the magnifying glass again to turn it OFF so that you scrolling around a page of search results doesn't turn into an unnecessary bandwidth-suck!