Sometimes we want to share a link to a website with someone but only want to show them one particular piece of information there. Most links are shared by using the normal URL and maybe adding a quick screenshot of the place we want them to check in the website or quickly copy and paste the text as we share it. Modern technology, however, allows us to prepare links to particular places on a website, but how can you share a particular piece of text in a URL with your peers?
In this article, we quickly want to show you how this can be done in a modern way. Back in the old Internet days, it was common to write huge websites with an enormous amount of text into a single page and then use links within the page to point from one end to another in a structured way. What I want to show you today, however, is not about old-school HTML on-page linking from one header to another. We have the tools, so why not use them? And see that link just there? It points directly to a piece of text as well as a reference for you.
How to create direct links to highlighted text on a website
The way I am showing you now is just one quick way of doing it in the Google Chrome browser. I’m sure that other browsers might have a similar function, though. You load up the website you want to share a particular part of as the first step. Then you navigate to the text part that you want to put your direct link on, highlight it with your mouse, right-click on it, and select the option “Copy link to highlight.”
Then the URL along with the suffix for pointing to the exact location is stored in your system’s clipboard. This means that you can now use the paste function, that’s either ctrl+v, or right-click and paste on Windows.
- Load a page in the Google Chrome browser.
- Highlight text with your mouse cursor and holding the left mouse button down.
- Right-click to get the context menu.
- Choose “Copy link to highlight.”
- Paste it in an IM or email to whomever you want to share this with.
What could you use this direct linking for?
What’s this useful for? Think of long web pages like scientific content or Wikipedia posts, for instance. If you only want to share a specific piece of text with a friend or colleague, you can follow the steps above and get them right to the desired place in the document, and it will even be highlighted for them once they load it up. Above is a screenshot of how it looks to create the direct link. Below you can see how it would look for the person you share the link to. The link itself would look like this: https://techacute.com/difference-between-consultants-and-advisors/#:~:text=Comparison,do%20different%20work
Depending on how the website works, the highlight might disappear upon trying to scroll up or down, but the basic function of bringing a person to the right place in a web document still works just fine, even if the highlight color might go away. Think about how we report news at TechAcute. Like this, we would be able to add links to sources like reported data or quotes much better. Readers, such as yourself, could directly land on the information they expected to see without first needing to “hunt” for the data they want to check.
If you’re using a version of Chrome that does not yet natively support this feature, you can enable it yourself. To find out how you can check out the video below by Megan Mongelli, who took the time to prepare an explainer video on exactly that step.
YouTube: Link to Your Highlighted Text in Chrome
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by Iyiola Olaniyan. The screenshots in the tutorial have been prepared by Christopher Isak for TechAcute.
