Now Google highlights your search results in yellow to improve your search experience inside external websites. This functionality works with Google’s Featured Snippets, these snippets are the containers (boxes) that show results for your search so you do not have to visit the website.
The highlighting happens when you click the website from these featured snippets and then the most appropriate answer for your search are highlighted in yellow. This feature also automatically scrolls down the webpage to show the highlights. The below screenshots would help you understand better.
Even though the SearchEngineLand reports that the feature is working for most of the featured snippets, but The Verge finding contradicts according to them it working in Chrome on desktop and Safari on mobile, but clicking on the same snippets in Edge or Safari on the desktop didn’t show the yellow text. There is a Google support page notes that the functionality may be limited based on what individual browsers support.
This is a great thing for users where they can quickly find their answers. But this new feature can conflict with the design of the website. SearchEngineLand highlights an important point where the scrolling can affect the Ad market. Since the Ads would be skipped if the highlights are below on the website. SearchEngineLand also says that websites may have to change their ad placement to abide by the Goggles new feature.
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 roll-out was confirmed via a tweet from Google’s official Search account – reports The Verge
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