How does `#:~:text=` in URL works to highlight text?

Question

TL;DR

How/why are some browsers able to search and highlight text in the HTML body which is followed by #:~:text= in the URL?

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Explanation

One day I was searching for something on Google, which lead me to Quora's result. I observed that 2 sentences were highlighted in yellow, which were part of URL after the aforementioned parameter. I thought this would be Quora's feature for SEO or something, however, also found this on Linkedin, and Medium, and so on.

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I'd like to know:

1. What is this highlighting called? Why/how does it work?
2. This seems to be browser-specific. What kind of browsers support this?
   It seems to work on Chrome and Edge; but not on Firefox, Safari, and IE.
3. Does a frontend programmer need to incorporate something in the code to have search engines highlight content on their web-pages? (Based on the assumption that search engines actually appends the relevant string predicted by user's query)

Answer 1

1. The highlighting is called Text Fragments. Its a new feature that was recently added to Chrome 80. It works by specifying a text snippet in the URL hash.

2. Yes it is browser specific.

3. No, the experience that you get when clicking on a link from Google's search results is part of Featured Snippets which are algorithmically determined. There is nothing you can incorporate into your code to prompt search engines to highlight text on your page.

There is no markup needed by webmasters. This happens automatically, using Scroll To Text for HTML pages https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096. See also more background here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325

Sources:

• https://web.dev/text-fragments/
• https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280115/google-search-engine-yellow-highlight-featured-snippet-anchor-text
• https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295300/google-link-to-text-fragment-chrome-extension-chromium-highlight-scroll-down
• https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-featured-snippet-to-web-page-content-highlight-feature-335511
• https://blog.chromium.org/2019/12/chrome-80-content-indexing-es-modules.html