Thread by @glenngabe

Auditing a site early and was thrown into a Google test. And it's a darn interesting one. :) Tweets to follow with what I'm seeing. @rustybrick

So, Google started linking featured snippets to highlighted text on a page (for AMP urls) back in December 2018. Well, I just started seeing that test for desktop! I've never seen that before. And it's using the targetText Chrome functionality that was written about in February.

Here's another example, this time for a health/medical query. Google is jumping you down the page to the exact text ON DESKTOP using the targetText functionality that they have been working on (which can allow you to jump anyone down the page via a link to specific text).

And here's one that went very wrong for some reason. Check out how much highlighted text there is on the page! Not sure how helpful that is for users after clicking a featured snippet. That said, most work very well. I'll keep the test window open and keep trying queries. :)

OK, here's another ex, this time for @rustybrick. Barry has the featured snippet for "google trending remove", and Google is driving me to the highlighted text down the page ON DESKTOP (via the test I'm in). Again, using the targetText functionality from Chrome (not released yet)

@rustybrick I had to check one of my featured snippets out. For "what are untrackable clicks?", Google is jumping me down the page and highlighting the text (again, ON DESKTOP). This was only being done for AMP on mobile. I'm in a test where G is doing this for dtop via targetText in Chrome.

@rustybrick And for anyone interested in targetText Chrome functionality, here's the explainer document from February. I cannot force this in my test browser window, but Google is using it to jump users to a specific part of the text (and highlight that text). github.com/WICG/ScrollToT…