How to Track Highlighted Text on Your Site with Google Analytics

I do that ALL the time, and I too was thinking that it would give you a bunch of garbage data.

But then I was also thinking, it could give you some useful measure of where people's eyes happened to be on the page- which copy they were reading and which they were skipping over.

I'm not the only one! I didn't think about users searching for text, but I did think that this could be useful to learn how much users are interacting with my site. (ie. Are they losing interest half way down a page? Are they drawn away from the main content body? Etc.)

Perhaps you can give us an example on how to implement this. I would be really interested in it.

Any chance you could share that knowledge? That sounds fantastically awesome!

nytimes.com used to do something like this. It was super annoying.

That stuff is absolute hell for people who compulsively highlight the text they're reading. So are all the sites with links everywhere that pop up a little social networking/other articles windows on highlight.

I use a FF extension called FastestFox which takes highlighted text and automagically pulls a snippet from wikipedia and/or the dictionary (it is smart enough to know which) in addition to offering the option of searching it in one of several configurable search engines. Very helpful when browsing. And works way better than when the NYTimes tried it.

My MSc thesis was on exactly this - adaptive web sites. It's a fascinating research topic.