We search and click through search results a lot, as this is an essential part of our browsing. Sometimes we are able to quickly see what we were looking for on the target page but more often than not we have to scroll down back and forth to find the exact part of the page that brought us there from the Google search results page.

Having the search terms highlighted on the target page will increase your browsing speed dramatically. This way you can quickly locate the most relevant part of the page and find the required information.

There are three tools that can highlight search terms on the page you land on.  Read on to find out about them.

1. Google Toolbar Highlighter

If you have the Google toolbar installed, you may be using its handy highlight feature:

  • It highlights each search term in a different color within the Google search results page;
  • It highlights each search term in a different color on each result page you go from SERPs;
  • It highlights each search term in a different color on each webpage you visit (even when a click did not originate from Google) as long as the highlighter in the toolbar is activated.
  • You can click through the terms which occurred on a page using the toolbar:
highlight search terms

2. Word Highlight (Greasemonkey)

Word Highlight is a Greasemonkey script which can be a nice alternative to the Google toolbar (in case you don't want to install it):

  1. It highlights each search term in a different color within the Google search results page;
  2. It highlights each search term in a different color on each result page you go from SERPs;
  3. You can click through the terms which occurred on a page using the toolbar;
  4. It displays a "heat" map of all colored search terms on a page:
highlight search results

To change the colors to whatever you want, you can edit the script:

  • Select Tools -> Greasemonkey -> Manage user scripts;
  • Choose "Word highlight" in the left-hand panel;
  • Click "Edit". This should open the installed version of the script in your favorite text editor (if it doesn't, choose any text editor to open the script);
  • Scroll down to the following line and edit all the colors (for example, you can set one color for all different search terms to make the output less colorful):
highlight search results

3. Google Quick Scroll (Google Chrome)

Google Quick Scroll is a Google Chrome extension that scrolls the target page right to the place you saw in Google snippet:

  • It works only if the search terms are hard to locate on the page you landed on after clicking through from the search result listing: it appears on the bottom-right corner of the page, showing one or more bits of text from the page that are relevant to your query. Clicking on the text will take you to that part of the page.
  • It highlights the part of the page that looks most relevant to your initial query.
highlight search terms

Are you using any of these tools?  Do you find them helpful?  Do you know of any others? Please share your thoughts!