What's with the new querystring text highlighting feature in Chrome?

Question

Recently, I noticed some Google Search links I have clicked have lead to webpages with temporarily yellow highlighted text. The highlight disappears when it is clicked off. The highlighted text can be specified by using the following querystring;

#:~:text=

A usage example:

http://example.com/#:~:text=illustrative

I am unable to find any documentation about this feature. It only appears to work on Chrome and not other browsers. How do I use it? Are there any similar features that have been recently implemented?

Answer 1

This feature in #fragment strings (not to be confused with ?query strings) appears to be documented in WICG/ScrollToTextFragment. (WICG is a W3C-run "community group" which proposes new features that might, or might not, eventually become standards.)

Google's likely adding this feature because its search engine has already supported linking to specific sections if the website already had the appropriate anchor tags, but many sites don't have any anchors defined.

Other browsers probably aren't very interested in this feature, as they don't run a search engine as a business.