Google Search makes it easier to find what you’re looking for

It’s happened to me a thousand times: I enter a query into Google Search, get exactly what I need right there in the search results, but when I click on the result to find out more, a webpage opens and the info I needed is… well, somewhere.

I then have to find it a second time, typically by clicking Ctrl-F to bring up the “find in page” feature. 

It seems those days are gone, though. 

Search Engine Land (via The Verge) has discovered that Google launched a new Search feature that highlights and scrolls down to text found in a featured snippet. 

Featured snippets are those little blurbs you get when searching for certain topics — you’ll recognize them by their gray border and (sometimes) a screenshot of the resulting webpage. 

And now, when you click through to that webpage, you’ll be sent to the exact part of the page the snippet was taken from, and you’ll see the text from the snippet highlighted yellow (see below). 

The interesting thing about this functionality is that it doesn’t require webmasters to do anything to enable it. Google shared some details on how it works in a couple of tweets on Wednesday. 

The feature should work on both desktop and mobile, but it doesn’t work in all scenarios. I’ve tried it out in Chrome with no issues, but I couldn’t get the feature to work in Safari. Google says that if a browser doesn’t support the underlying technology needed for the feature to work, the user will be taken to the top of the web page. 

SearchEngineLand says the feature has been in testing for a couple of years, so… better late than never, right?