Google has introduced a new content highlighting feature on the iOS Safari app.
The company has been experimenting with new ways to find information on third-party sites, and will now highlight specific blocks of text or sections when relevant to your search term.
According to SearchEngineLand, the new feature works in conjunction with Featured Snippets, which are designed to give users answers to questions without visiting websites.
When you click on a snippet or search result, you’ll still be taken to the same web page as before, but now any relevant text will be highlighted in yellow, and the page will scroll down.
A spokesperson from Google revealed that the company has been trialing the feature for a number of years, first rolling out highlighting for its Accelerated Mobile Pages in 2018.
This week, the feature has been rolled out across Chrome and Safari on iOS for the first time.
As we have done with AMP pages since December 2018, clicking on a featured snippet now takes users to the exact text highlighted for HTML pages, when we can confidently determine where the text is, for browsers that support the underlying technology….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2020
It’s important to note that this feature is experimental and won’t always work, but Google is working on rolling out highlighting to more web pages and use cases in the coming months.
Though this new feature is good news for consumers, SearchEngineLand has suggested that it could be bad news for the ad market, as users may choose to scroll down to find information and highlights.
This could force Google to change its ad slots in the years ahead.
Are you pleased with this new feature? Let us know and check back soon for more news.