Google Makes Quoted Searches More Useful With Highlighted Results

pcmag.com:

Google is making a tweak to quoted searches that promises to make them better at finding relevant results. 

The next time you make a quoted search on a desktop, Google will label the queried term in bold as it appears in the search results. Specifically, the bolded text will appear in the “snippets” preview Google displays under each search result. 

“That means you can more easily identify where to find [the quoted search] after you click the link and visit the content,” the company wrote(Opens in a new window) in a blog post on Thursday. 

Quoted searches are for those times when you want the search results to mention a specific phrase or sentence. It's a great tool for narrowing your searches when normal Google queries are struggling to produce helpful results. 

Before, Google refrained from highlighting the text in quoted searches because the quoted material could pop up in parts of a web page that didn’t create helpful preview snippets, according to Google software engineer Yonghao Jin.

“For example, a word or phrase might appear in the menu item of a page, where you’d navigate to different sections of the site. Creating a snippet around sections like that might not produce an easily readable description,” he wrote in the blog post. 

The company decided to shift gears, citing user input. “​​We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this,” he added.  

That said, don’t expect every quoted search term to be readily visible on a web page provided through Google’s results. During a quoted search, Google will also look for the term in a website’s description text,