An important feature of Blossom Search is displaying the context of search terms on the search results page. The context, typically a sentence containing the search terms, is called a snippet. To make it clearer why the context is relevant, Blossom Search highlights the search terms in the snippet.
Currently, we are testing highlighting snippets on retrieved HTML files using a new feature of many browsers called "text fragments". The feature is triggered by adding a command at the end of the URL for a document. The command begins with :~:text= and identifies the text to be highlighted. The resulting effect is that the snippet is highlighted and the page is scrolled, if needed, to bring the snippet into view.
A similar feature is being tested on PDF files. Some PDF readers allow search terms to be appended to a URL causing the terms to be highlighted wherever they appear in the document. Again, this feature is not available in all browsers. We've been using Firefox for our tests; Chromium-based browsers do not currently offer this feature.
This feature has left testing and is now live.
