Clicking featured snippets in Google Search will now take you directly to the result

Google offers dozens of different Internet services, but its most important one has always been Search. Search has undergone many changes since 1998, and two of those changes were designed to make searching more convenient and accessible to users: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Featured snippets. The former makes loading web content much faster on mobile devices while the latter shows you portions of a webpage that Google thinks has the answer you’re looking for. Since December 2018, clicking an AMP link from a featured snippet would highlight the exact part of the page that was featured, and now, that same functionality has extended more broadly.

If you’re searching on Google and see a highlighted answer from a featured snippet, opening the website link will now take you directly to the part where the answer shows up and highlight that text in yellow. This can help you find the information you’re looking for much more quickly without having to skim through the entire page or using CTRL+F.

This works for both AMP as previously mentioned as well as HTML pages, and there’s nothing additional that needs to be done by webmasters in order to support this feature. If, for whatever reason, the featured snippet can’t be highlighted, the featured website will open up just like it always has done.

A featured snippet and its respective search result highlighted on the page when clicked.

Danny Sullivan, a search liaison at Google, confirms that this feature is now standard for users clicking on HTML and AMP pages from featured snippets.

We’ve done this regularly with AMP pages since December 2018. We tested with HTML pages last year, as noted. We now do it regularly HTML pages, since last week. More info here: https://t.co/z0AP78h1qH

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 3, 2020

The official Google Search Liaison Twitter account also confirmed this and added that the scroll anchoring is done using the Scroll To Text Fragment feature for HTML pages on supported browsers.

There is no markup needed by webmasters. This happens automatically, using Scroll To Text for HTML pages https://t.co/cE9O2cBgKu. See also more background here: https://t.co/vKFmR3HLK3

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2020

Do you like this feature? Let us know in the comments.

Via: Search Engine Land

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