Quick Scroll is a new little tool from Google for Google Chrome. It basically helps to navigate to the part of the document that you saw when clicking on Google search result.
After you click on a Google search result, Quick Scroll may appear on the bottom-right corner of the page, showing one or more bits of text from the page that are relevant to your query. Clicking on the text will take you to that part of the page.
What it means is the following:
(1) The user searches Google to find something and clicks more or less relevant result;
(2) Having landed on the page, he sees it seems to be about the topic but he can’t find the exact place that caught his attention when being at SERPs;
(3) Here’s where the Chrome extension comes to rescue: it displays a little pop-up below the screen with the quote from the search result snippet;
(4) The user may click that quote and he will be taken to the exact place of the document used to create Google search result snippet.
Note that the little window won’t appear always: for example you won’t notice the tool when the keywords from your search or the quote from the snippet are on top of the page or quite visible. The tool will only interfere when you are likely to need it.
Quick Scroll appears only when it’s likely to be useful, helping make sure it won’t get in your way when it’s not needed.
Why I thought that was a cool tool to share?
The most important reason why I thought Quickscroll is worth sharing here is that it demonstrates Google’s plans and experiments on introducing further navigation right within the document itself. First that was named anchors as additional page navigation aid, then “Jump to…” links below the clickable page title and now this.
I also stumbled across this thread about related Google patent – Artificial Anchor for a Document in the SERPs:
With systems and methods described herein, mechanisms are provided to generate or simulate links with artificial named anchors and to allow the browser to recognize the artificial named anchor and navigate directly to the desired specific part of the target webpage even when the author of the webpage has not created a named anchor at the specific part of the webpage.
