One trend that's been wandering casually around the Internet lately has been the use of Javascript to highlight words in a page, if you visit that page via a Google search.
Like many of these web-tricks, it was interesting and 'neat' at first, but now I think its 15 minutes is up, and can we please quietly pack that script away and move on to something else?
The benefit of search-term highlighting is that it allows you to see where in a document the match occurred, which may sometimes be hard to spot.
The practical result, however, is different. It's very rare that I ask Google to give me a page that occasionally mentions the terms I am searching for. If it does, then Google is either not doing its job, or it's a really obscure search. What I usually want (and end up with) is a page that is largely about the terms I am searching for.
Even if I'm searching for something really specific that might only be mentioned in one section of a document, I'm probably going to have used several search terms that occur all the way through the page, and then added the specific, narrowing term on the end.
Which means, from experience, that these Javascript-enhanced pages light up like a Christmas tree.
The effect of the highlighting is to completely disrupt the flow of the page. The highlighted terms are dotted pretty evenly through the page (making having your eyes drawn to their location pointless), and the highlighting is usually more colourful and 'interesting' to your eyes than the page's headings, which might be more useful in locating the precise information you were after.
One cool thing GMail does about that is providing a "Turn on/off highlighting" link on the right side of the searched messages. This way, you get the best of both worlds.
Most people[*] know how to use "find". More advanced users know the hotkey for it. The javascript just isn't helpful. Cute, but not helpful.
[*](and yes, I'm including the less computer literate here - the example I have in mind is my 76 year old mother, who knows how to use "find" in applications she uses - an ancient netscape for both web and mail)
bollocks. I _love_ google's highlighting. If you dont, then turn it off. Better than the mere highlighting is the ability to flick through the matching words by clicking on them. I wish there were a shortcut key for this (maybe there is and I dont know it).
And to Andrew, how you can say that "find" is helpful, and argue that google's functionality isn't is beyond me. Its more or less the same functionality throgh a different interface. fwiw I prefer google's interface.
my 2c.
cheers
dim
Dmitri Colebatch: this issue has nothing to do with anything that Google implements (are you confusing it with the keyword highlighting when loading a cached document?).
Not confusing it with loading a cached document, but I may well be confusing it all the same.
What I'm talking about is google's toolbar, which has functionality similar to what you're describing, and I'm assuming is implemented in the same manner.
Are we in agreement regarding the functionality? Or am I still confused?
cheers
dim
ps (your tab index ordering needs to be fixed - tabbing from the comments field takes me way up the top of this page)
I think my searchhi script (http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/searchhi/) was one of the first things to do this highlighting automatically. I don't know whether most of the sites doing JS search-term-highlighting are using it or a derivative, but if they are, then you can turn down the impact of the search terms by adding a style for span.searchword in your user stylesheet which is less displeasing to the eye: maybe something like
span.searchword { background-color: transparent; border: 1px solid #ccc; border-width: 0 0 1px 0; }
which will give highlighted search words a lightish grey underline rather than a bright yellow background.
Yes - excellent point. It should be done on the user side, not server side. If you use FireFox, there are two extensions called Context Search and Context Highlight that provide great functionality for finding text.
Waaaaahh!!