This certainly comes as good news to internet-surfers…well, taking it from a report by SearchEngineLand stating that Google is trying to make it easier to find the information that one will be looking for on external websites by highlighting relevant sections in yellow.
The functionality works with Google’s Featured Snippets — the standalone boxes that appear at the top of search results that attempt to give you answers without having to visit a website beyond Google.
Clicking the snippet still takes you to the webpage that it pulled the information from, but now the text from the snippet will be highlighted in yellow, and the browser will automatically scroll down to the section in question. You can see how it looks in practice in the screenshot below.
According to Google’s Danny Sullivan, the company has been working on the functionality for a while. It rolled it out for AMP pages in 2018, and started testing the functionality on HTML pages last year. As of last week however, Google is now regularly using the feature on HTML pages. The rollout was confirmed via a tweet from Google’s official Search account.
A Google support page notes that the functionality may be limited based on what individual browsers support.
For the most part, this seems like a common sense way to get users to the content they’ve searched for more quickly, even if the yellow highlighting might clash with the design of the site.
However, SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature.
