Faster than “Find”? More powerful than a speeding “Return”? Highlighting! 0
Highlighting keywords lets you scroll to visible clusters of terms rather than jumping to one word via your browser’s “Find” function. This can reduce the time it takes to determine whether the page is relevant to your search.
To highlight using a page of Google results, click on the “cached” link. Because Google caches (stores) the webpages it examines, the cached links frequently load faster and may be available if the original pages go down. You can sometimes even access the cached version from a site that otherwise requires registration or subscription! The down side is that cached pages can destroy formatting, prevents scripts from working and present (slightly) outdated content. So just remember that, when you’ve found a page that’s relevant, follow the top link for the most up-to-date content.
You can also highlight words on any page already loaded in your browser with Google Toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or Googlebar (for most other browsers). Once installed, click the Google button, choose ‘Toolbar Options’, scroll to ‘Finding words within a page’, and fill the check boxes next to the ‘Highlight’ and ‘Word Find’ buttons. Now you can click the ‘Highlight’ button on your browser’s toolbar to toggle colored highlighting of your search terms.
For Macintosh users, try the public beta of Safari 3.0 or wait for the release of Leopard to benefit from its advanced highlighting options: the new live search feature will dim the page (!) while highlighting every match of the search term.