You know that Google Search on some browsers can now highlight text and even scroll down to the portion of the page with the text from the search results page to your web page. Well, now it seems to also work not just in web searches featured snippets but also in Google Image search.
Glenn Gabe noticed the #:~:text= urls showing up URL pattern in some of his Search Console reporting:
Isn't this interesting... A client pinged me about seeing this in their reporting. Google must be testing ScrollToText functionality in *Google Images*. I'm seeing #:~:text= urls showing up in the reporting as of 8/4 (across sites). I don't see this yet while testing: pic.twitter.com/wUvaYjNCtv
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 12, 2020
I then asked him for the query and it was [BOM]. It worked for me, it did not work for him, in terms of being able to click on the image result and see it jump to his page, scroll down and highlight the text.
Here is a screen shot of the image search results page (click to enlarge):
Here is a screen shot showing his page highlighting the text after the scroll down (click to enlarge):
Weird that this works on Google Images when it should seem to only work on Google Web Search, with featured snippets. Just seems weird.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
