Searching hidden text on web pages?

Question

Often I'll be searching for something in google, and see a particular snippet in the short description that catches my eye.

But when I open the web page, the text in question is hidden behind some kind of "Click Here to Expand"-type javascript action. This text is also hidden from the Ctrl+F search.

Is there any way search this text? I normally use chrome, but techniques for IE or Firefox would be cool as well.

Answer 1

Try using Right-Click-> View Page Source, then Ctrl-F in the Page Source window will find the text if it is there.

Answer 2

I often click to view the "cached" google version, as it highlights my search terms. Some sites change fairly regularly and it's not uncommon for the google snippet to no longer exist at all!

Answer 3

If you're using Firefox, hit CTRL + U to view the page's source. In Internet Explorer, go to View -> Source.

Then, you should be able to find whatever text your looking for (usually contained within an HTML element). The element is hidden by JavaScript setting the element's display style to "none".

Answer 4

If you happen to have a text-based browser like links installed, you can simply:

links -dump $URL-that-has-what-you-want

Answer 5

Google uses the <meta name="Description" ... > in the "snippet", if you include one. N.b. it doesn't consider that content when calculating the relevance of a page, but only to pretty up the search results display.