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Comment by dennisgorelik | Hacker News Reader

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dennisgorelik

Do you hate using Google search results too?

Search keywords in these results are highlighted.

If your goal is to hide your intent from web sites you visit - you can just turn off URL Referrer in your browser.

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It's a rare search that takes me to a page that mentions what I'm searching for exactly once.

Search result pages and destination pages serve completely different purposes, and you can't apply the same UI to both. If you ran a restaurant, you might decide to laminate the menus, but I hope you wouldn't laminate the entrees, too.

If it doesn't make sense to highlight search keywords that web masters wouldn't do that would they?

Highlighting "salmon" menu entries on web site could make sense for the user who is searching for "salmon", wouldn't it?

But let's be more specific: I run a job board (PostJobFree) and recruiters frequently find resumes on Goolge in queries like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Aresume+sharepoint+C...

If you open first result - you can see how these keywords are highlighted. I'm pretty sure that this highlighting is a convenient feature for recruiters who want to quickly scan resume.

Ugh, you really need some basic formatting. I can't even see where one job ends and another one starts. And the contextless highlight doesn't make that any better.

I don't like it because, often, the keyword I'm looking for is sprinkled throughout the whole page, putting highlights sporadically everywhere.

Curious: have you tested/surveyed user preference to having that feature or not?

I have not tested/surveyed users about, but I personally like highlighting in this case and in ~4 years nobody complained about highlighting.

Have you asked? I wouldn't go out of my way to let a webmaster know, I would just be annoyed. From the looks of HN replies, this is not uncommon.

a lot of people don't know what they want until its given as an option. Regardless, its exactly why A/B tests exist

It takes some effort to setup such test. There are more important things to do.

Besides - there is no point testing it now, considering that Google slowly takes away that option.

You're right -- it takes time/effort, you know your business better than anyone to figure out if it's worth testing and optimizing. However, the lack of complaints shouldn't be construed as approval or desire.

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