One of the best Google search hacks is getting even better

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

You can use quotation marks to find an exact word or phrase on the internet. It is a good way to find out what you are looking for. The small snippets underneath a search result link will now be created based on where the term appears on the page, according to an announcement on Thursday.

There is a good image that shows how this will work in practice, which I have included below. The two snippets shown in the example both include the bolded phrase "google search"

Image: Google

Under a link, you can see a small excerpt from a page, but it may not show where the quote came from. Yonghao Jin wrote a post explaining why that was and why it was changed.

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.

There are a few things to keep in mind when quoting searches. Some text may be hidden in a meta description tag or alt text and not be easily visible on a page, for example, or a quoted term may have been removed from a page in an update. For mobile results, bolding won't work.