Styling ::search-text and Modern Highlight Pseudo-Elements in Web Design

Highlighting search matches and user-selected content is a subtle but powerful part of modern web interfaces. With the arrival of the ::search-text pseudo-element in Chrome 144, developers now have more precise control over how browser-native highlights look and behave. This article explains how to style ::search-text, how it relates to other highlight-oriented pseudo-elements, and how you can use them to improve usability, accessibility, and brand consistency.

Key Takeaways

• ::search-text allows you to style in-page search results directly in CSS, including the current active match.
• Highlight pseudo-elements like ::selection and ::target-text help create consistent, branded highlight experiences across the site.
• Using custom highlight styles can improve readability, accessibility, and the perceived quality of your web application or content site.
• Thoughtful highlight styling supports better UX and can indirectly contribute to stronger engagement metrics for SEO and performance-focused projects.

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What Is ::search-text?

The ::search-text pseudo-element is a new CSS feature that allows you to style text matches produced by the browser’s in-page search (typically triggered via Ctrl+F or Cmd+F). By default, Chrome 144 highlights all search results in yellow and the currently focused match in orange. With ::search-text, you can override these default styles to better match your design system.

Alongside ::search-text, there is a ::search-text:current state that represents the currently active match—the one the user is focused on as they step through results. This distinction is crucial when designing experiences where users need to quickly identify the current match among many.

Use ::search-text to define the default look of all search hits and ::search-text:current to emphasize the active one the user is currently viewing.

Why This Matters for Modern Web Interfaces

Native browser highlighting often clashes with custom UI. On carefully branded sites, those default yellow/orange highlights can feel jarring. For web applications, documentation portals, SaaS dashboards, and ecommerce search pages, consistent highlight styling can:

• Improve content scanning and readability
• Make search behavior feel integrated rather than “bolted on”
• Support accessibility by making active results easier to see

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Basic Usage of ::search-text

To start using ::search-text, you can define its appearance globally on the html or body element. For example:

Example concept (no code): Visual styles you might apply include background color, text color, outline, and text decoration to clearly distinguish matched text from the surrounding content.

Styling All Search Matches

At a minimum, you want all search results to have a distinct, readable style. The key is to choose colors with sufficient contrast and avoid conflicts with other meaning-carrying colors in your interface (e.g., error red, success green).

For instance, you could design matches to:

• Use a light brand accent color behind the text
• Switch the text color to a dark neutral for legibility
• Add subtle padding or an outline to make matches stand out in dense text

Highlighting the Current Match: ::search-text:current

The ::search-text:current selector targets the single match that the browser currently considers active as the user navigates through results. It should stand out more than other matches.

Common design patterns for the current match include:

• Using a more intense background color or a thicker outline
• Adding a border radius to differentiate it from other highlights
• Subtle animation (e.g., a gentle glow or transition) to help catch the eye without being distracting

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Other Highlight-Oriented Pseudo-Elements

The ::search-text pseudo-element is part of a broader set of CSS features that control highlight behavior. Understanding these together helps you build a consistent visual language for user interactions across your site or application.

::selection

The ::selection pseudo-element lets you style user-selected text (for example, when someone drags their cursor to copy a paragraph). By default, browsers use different colors per platform, which may not align with your brand.

Typical customizations include:

• Adjusting the background color to a subtle brand accent
• Ensuring chosen colors meet accessibility contrast guidelines
• Matching selection styles to those used by ::search-text for a coherent highlight language

::target-text

The ::target-text pseudo-element is used to style text that becomes the target of a fragment navigation in a URL, such as when a link scrolls to and highlights a specific part of a page. This is especially useful for:

• Documentation sites linking to specific phrases or sentences
• Legal or compliance pages where citations point to exact wording
• Search results pages that deep-link users into long-form content

By styling ::target-text thoughtfully, you make it obvious what part of the content the user was sent to, reducing confusion and improving navigation clarity.

Using ::highlight() for Advanced Use Cases

For more advanced scenarios, the ::highlight() pseudo-element (part of the CSS Highlight API) enables programmatic control over highlights created by JavaScript. This is particularly valuable for:

• Custom in-page search implementations
• Annotation tools and collaborative editing interfaces
• Interactive educational content that needs multi-layered highlighting

With ::highlight(), you can define named highlight sets and style them differently—for example, one color for search matches, another for user comments, and a third for system-generated hints.

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Design Considerations for Business and Product Teams

For business owners and product leads, these pseudo-elements are not just visual tweaks; they influence how users navigate, comprehend, and engage with content. Well-designed highlights can reduce friction and help users find what they need faster, which directly supports conversion and retention.

Brand Consistency and Professional Appearance

When browser defaults dictate highlight colors, they can clash with your branding and make the interface feel less refined. Customizing highlight pseudo-elements helps your application or website:

• Feel cohesive across all interactions, from text selection to search results
• Reinforce your brand colors in subtle, functional ways
• Stand out from competitors relying on generic browser defaults

Accessibility and Readability

Accessibility is a key factor when designing highlight styles. Poor color choices can make highlighted text harder to read, particularly for users with visual impairments or color vision deficiencies.

When defining styles for ::search-text, ::selection, and related pseudo-elements, consider:

• Ensuring adequate contrast between text and highlight background
• Testing in both light and dark themes if your product supports them
• Avoiding color combinations that encode meaning solely through color

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Practical Use Cases for ::search-text in Real Projects

Beyond aesthetics, targeted highlight styling can drive tangible UX improvements in a variety of business and technical contexts.

Documentation and Knowledge Bases

In large documentation portals, users frequently rely on in-page search to locate specific terms or code references. Customizing ::search-text makes it easier for them to:

• Differentiate all matches from the active result they are inspecting
• Scan dense technical content without losing their place
• Quickly step through a series of related results

This can reduce support load and help users self-serve more effectively.

Ecommerce and Content-Rich Sites

On ecommerce category pages, product listings, or long-form content, users often search within the page to find specific features, sizes, or topics. Thoughtful styling of ::search-text can:

• Highlight product attributes that match the user’s query
• Guide attention to the most relevant part of a description
• Make advanced filters and search feel more integrated and professional

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Implementation Tips for Developers

When integrating ::search-text and related pseudo-elements into production code, consider the following workflow:

1. Start with a Design System

Align highlight styles with your existing design tokens (colors, border radius, typography). This ensures any changes can be centrally managed and remain consistent across:

• In-page search (::search-text)
• User text selection (::selection)
• Fragment navigation (::target-text)

2. Test Across Browsers and Themes

Support for newer pseudo-elements can vary, and color choices may behave differently in dark mode versus light mode.

As part of your QA process:

• Confirm that unsupported browsers gracefully fall back to defaults
• Verify highlight visibility against different backgrounds
• Check behavior with browser accessibility features enabled

3. Integrate with Custom Search Implementations

If your application uses a custom search component (e.g., powered by an internal API or a third-party search service), consider combining ::search-text with the CSS Highlight API and ::highlight() for a unified visual experience between browser-native and app-native search features.

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Conclusion

The introduction of ::search-text gives designers and developers more control over a subtle but important interaction: how users see in-page search results. When combined with other highlight-focused pseudo-elements like ::selection, ::target-text, and ::highlight(), it enables a coherent, branded highlight strategy across your entire site or application.

For businesses focused on usability, professionalism, and performance, investing a small amount of time into highlight styling can yield outsized returns in clarity, perceived quality, and user satisfaction.

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