Agosto, 2022

Whether you’re on a vacation or just running to your next work meeting, we want to make it easier for you to quickly find information without having to type things out on a cramped smartphone keyboard. That’s why we introduced “Touch to Search” in the Chrome app for Android a few years ago. Touch to Search lets you do things like press on specific words on web pages to quickly search them, whether it’s to learn more about a place of interest or get help with a translation.

Here are four helpful tips on how to make the most of Touch to Search when you’re on the go:

1. Get faster translations.

Let’s say you’re checking out the menu of a new restaurant and you come across a French phase you don’t understand. Press on the word, and if you’ve fully enabled Touch to Search in Settings, you’ll see an immediate translation in the bar on the bottom of your screen. You can also tap or swipe up on the bar to visit a search results page for the word you selected. Of course, Chrome can also automatically translate a full page in your desired language.

2. Get helpful info in context.

In addition to translations, if you stumble across a person, word or place you’re unfamiliar with, Touch to Search can get you up to speed — right in context. Press on the word in question, and you’ll see an informative card from Touch to Search.

3. Tap or hold down to get results.

When we say “press” on words, that means you can usually tap or hold-down on words to activate Touch to Search, so it’s simple for you to search in context. Recently, we standardized what happens when you tap and when you hold down, so you’ll get the same experience of Touch to Search regardless of which gesture you prefer. One caveat: There’s some sites on the web with unique interfaces which disable tapping words, so if you encounter that, try holding down instead.

4. Use more simple settings.

We want controlling your settings in Chrome to feel intuitive, so we updated Touch to Search’s settings to give you more fine-grained control over how you want to use the feature. Now when you enable “Include surrounding text in Google searches,” you’ll be more likely to get high-quality results – including through translations and definitions right on the page.

There’s more to come

We’re always exploring more ways to make it easier to search on-the-go in Chrome. One feature we’re testing out is related searches. This adds suggestions into Touch to Search that are based on what you’ve selected, to make it simple to learn even more about what you’ve just seen. For example, if you select the words “San Francisco,” we could show helpful suggestions like “San Francisco population” or “San Francisco events.” We’re continually exploring ways to make it easier to find information in Chrome, including the unique needs people have when searching on their Android or iOS phones. Look out for more features soon.

Sometimes people know they absolutely, positively only want webpages that mention a particular word or phrase. For example, maybe you want to find out about phone chargers but only those that support wireless charging. Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.

Now we’re making quoted searches better. The snippets we display for search results (meaning the text you see describing web content) will be formed around where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document. That means you can more easily identify where to find them after you click the link and visit the content. On desktop, we’ll also bold the quoted material.

For example, if you did a search such as [“google search”], the snippet will show where that exact phrase appears:

In the past, we didn’t always do this because sometimes the quoted material appears in areas of a document that don’t lend themselves to creating helpful snippets. For example, a word or phrase might appear in the menu item of a page, where you’d navigate to different sections of the site. Creating a snippet around sections like that might not produce an easily readable description.

We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this.

Things to keep in mind about quoted searches

For those doing quoted searches, here are some more tips, along with caveats on how quoted searching works.

Quoted searches may match content not readily visible on a page. As referenced above, sometimes quoted searches match content contained within a web page that isn’t readily visible, making it seem like the content isn’t on the page when it actually is present.

For example, content in a meta description tag is looked at for matches, even though that content isn’t visible on the web page itself. ALT text that describes images is considered, as is the text within a page’s URL. Material brought in through inline frames (iframes) is also matched. Google may also see content that doesn’t initially load on a page when you go to it, such content rendered through JavaScript that only appears if you click to make it display.

Pro tip: Sometimes people use the standard Find command in a browser to jump to the phrase they want, after arriving on a page. If that doesn’t work, though, you can try using a developer tools option. For instance, in Chrome, you can search from within Developer Tools to match against all rendered text, which would include the text in drop-down menus and other areas of the site.

Pages may have changed since Google last visited them. While Google revisits pages across the web regularly, they can change in between visits. This means quoted material might appear on a page when we saw it, but it no longer exists on the current page. If available, viewing the Google cached copy may show where the quoted content appeared on the version of the page we visited.

Quoted terms may only appear in title links and URLs. Quoted terms won’t appear in web page snippets if they only appear within title links or URLs of a web page. We also do not bold matches that happen in title links and URLs.

Punctuation is sometimes seen as spaces. Our systems see some punctuation as spaces, which impacts quoted searches. For example, a search for [“don’t doesn’t”] tells our systems to find content that contains all these letters in this order:

don t doesn t

As a result, we’ll match content like the ones below, where punctuation like commas or hyphens break up words — because when you remove the punctuation, the letter patterns are the same:

• don’t, doesn’t
• don’t / doesn’t
• don’t – doesn’t

Snippets might not show multiple quoted terms. If a search involves multiple quoted terms, the snippet may not show all of them if they are far apart from each other. Similarly, if quoted material appears several times on a page, a snippet will show what seems to be the most relevant occurrence.

We mainly bold quoted content for web page snippets on desktop.

Our new bolding of quoted content generally only works for web page snippets on desktop. Bolding won’t appear in snippets for recipe or video boxes, and it also won’t appear when using some special modes such as image or news search. However, anything listed in these boxes or special modes will contain the quoted terms. Bolding also doesn’t work for mobile results.

Quoted searches don’t work for local results. Quote restriction does not work for results in our local box where listings usually appear with a map; we’ll be looking more at this area in the future.

To quote or not to quote?

Using quotes can definitely be a great tool for power users. We generally recommend first doing any search in natural language without resorting to operators like quotation marks. Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary.

By default, our systems are designed to look for both the exact words and phrases entered and related terms and concepts, which is often useful. If you use a quoted search, you might miss helpful content that uses closely related words.

Of course, there are those times when the exact word being on a page makes all the difference. For those situations, quoted searches remain available and are now even better.