Google now highlights featured snippet text within a page once you open it

[Karlston]

Google now highlights featured snippet text within a page once you open it

Google is making a new improvement to the featured snippets in its search results. If you're unfamiliar, featured snippets are a special kind of search result, which appears in a box at the top of the list, and presents a snippet of the text in the webpage above the link to it.

 

As reported by Search Engine Land (via The Verge), Google has now added support for a new feature, which will highlight that snippet text on the full webpage, should you choose to open it. What's more, Google will try to automatically scroll down to wherever the snippet text is located inside the webpage, potentially skipping past ads or less relevant information.

 

Image credit: Search Engine Land

Image credit: Search Engine Land

 

Google's Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature, saying this has been done with AMP webpages since 2018, and that the company has been testing the feature with HTML pages since last year. Since last week, this is now being done regularly for these pages.

 

The feature is based on the ScrollToTextFragment, which is a relatively new web technology being developed by the Web Incubator Community Group at W3C, and it's still being discussed or implemented in some browsers. As noted by Google on the Chrome Platform Status page, public reception of the feature has been mixed, so it might only work in Chrome for now.

 

 

Google now highlights featured snippet text within a page once you open it