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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:
Here is a video of it in action from Jackson:
You can now easily highlight and search
— Jackson Lo 🚀📈 (@jackson_lo) November 21, 2020
This new? @rustybrick #productivity pic.twitter.com/344efDiZAE
He confirmed he removed all his extensions and this feature is still there:
Fairly certain it is not.. just peeled back all of my extensions one by one pic.twitter.com/KeEenm7DHz
— Jackson Lo 🚀📈 (@jackson_lo) November 22, 2020
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:
