Highlights –

  • A brief excerpt that displays the exact location of your quoted term in bold language will now be displayed below the search results (opens in a new tab). It looks like the update is already working.
  • Users can utilize Touch to Search to quickly search for particular words or phrases without leaving the website.

Google has tweaked the way quoted searches work on its engine and has made a few improvements in the ‘Touch to Search’ feature on the mobile Chrome app.

Quoted search refers to when you place a search keyword/phrase in quote marks around a search term, and Google will display results that precisely contain those words. The previous style’s issue was that the keyword’s location on the page was not displayed in the Google Search results. You had to look a little harder. However, a small snippet will now reveal the exact location of your quoted term in bold language below the search results (opens in a new tab). It looks like the update is already working.

How it started

In a blog post on the updates, Google Search Software Engineer Yonghao Jin stated that the snippet wasn’t added earlier because some web pages made it challenging to integrate. You may have to spend some time looking for a particular term because it may be hidden behind a page menu or in another part of the website. Despite this problem, Google decided to move forward with the snippet upgrade.

Google acknowledges that the snippet adjustments are not flawless or standardized. “The snippet may not show all of them if they are [too] far apart from each other” if the quoted term appears more than once on a web page. Bolded words in Google Search for the desktop will primarily be exclusive. According to the release, the bold language won’t show up in snippets on mobile devices or in some search modes like Images or News.

Changes in mobile Chrome

Regarding Chrome mobile, the Touch to Search feature received several updates (opens in a new tab).

Users can utilize Touch to Search to quickly search for particular words or phrases without leaving the website. This feature shows when Google Chrome is updated on our mobile devices.

The tool now has more precise control over how users interact with the functionality. You can enable the “Include surrounding text in Google results” option in the Chrome Settings menu to include the text surrounding a highlighted word in a Google search for better outcomes. As Google claims to have recently standardized the procedure, accepted hand gestures have also undergone some changes. Before, one had to tap and hold down on it to highlight it. Chrome now acknowledges a single tap as highlighting.

According to the release, Google is reportedly working on new Chrome capabilities, one of which is providing suggestions based on the word or phrase you highlighted. You might see suggestions like “San Francisco events” or “San Francisco population” if you highlight the term “San Francisco,” for instance.