Google Tests Highlighting Snippets To Refine Your Search

Nov 23, 2020 - 7:41 am 1 by
Filed Under Google

Google Highlight Text Search

Here is a weird Google Search feature that the company may be testing. Jackson Lo first notified me of it on Twitter, where if you do a search in Google and then highlight text on the search results page, Google will overlay a box to let you search for the text you highlighted.

Here is a clean screen shot of this in action from @shemiadhikarath:

click for full size

Here is a video of it in action from Jackson:

He confirmed he removed all his extensions and this feature is still there:

Jackson Lo explained to me that he believes this is native to the Google search bar magnifying glass, that he cannot get it to work on Video, Books, News, etc search verticals and it also does not work on any web page - so it is a Google Search page test.

And yes, others have seen this over the weekend. So I guess this is a weird Google Search or more likely Google Chrome test.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Bing also is testing this in multiple browsers:

click for full size

 

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