I love the search feature in Gmail but once I find the message I seek, I hate the yellow highlight of the matched word in the message. If I search for someone’s name, it can be way over the top with tons of matches too. How can I remove the highlight?
I often take screen captures — as I did for this article — and know exactly what you’re talking about. Do a search in Google’s Gmail system and while the summary listing of messages don’t highlight the match, when you’re reading a specific message, the occurrence or occurrences of the matching word, phrase or pattern are displayed with a subtle yellow background highlight. I’m not a fan.
You can turn it off, but it’s not obvious how to do that because, by my way of thinking, it’s been added to the wrong menu. Then again, it’s Google and while the team’s great at building big scale tools, their user interfaces quite often leave something to be desired. And sometimes, it’s far worse than that. 🙂
Okay, enough sniping, right? Let’s get down to it.
I’ll search for “reset” in my Gmail account:
There are a lot of messages that contain “reset”, no surprise.
I’ll click on one and you can see the highlighting, whether it’s in the subject, the body, against a blue background, etc:
Useful but just possibly over the top.
The logical place (to me) for the remove highlight option to be located is on the menu hidden under the “reply” arrow on the top right of the message. Click on it, though, and there’s no joy:
Well, heck. So where is it?
Turns out that it’s on the “More” menu at the very top of the screen:
Maybe that’s logical to you, but every time I want to find that feature, I look and look before I remember where it is.
Once “Turn off highlighting” is selected, however, at least things become what I’d hope:
Much better! 🙂
And now you know. The “turn off highlighting” feature is there, you just have to find the correct menu!
And if you aren’t seeing it on the menu it’s because Gmail thinks that there aren’t any highlights being displayed from a Gmail search…
Thank you!
Yes, it does not work for me. Yellow Highlighting after a spell check remains after even a recheck and clicking x. Sent it to myself and came back with the same yellow highlighting. It is not as simple as Dave suggests as on my drop down menu there is no “more” there. Come on G mail, get your act together and make yourselves User friendly. It’s just exasperating. I have spent hours trying to delete the yellow high lighting from an important official mail.
What browser and OS are you using, Ian? Are you sure the highlighting is in response to you doing a search in Gmail? If it’s part of the document itself, then you’ll need to apply a “no background color” format to the entire document / message…
I think that putting it in the More button makes sense. Based on where that is in the UI, it’s for the entire thread whereas that down arrow next tot the ‘Reply’ icon is for just the message (and there’s one per message).
Within that context, removing the highlighting is logically something that happens to the entire thread, and not to a particular message.
Hey. thanks sooooo much for this! It worked.
Okey, but here’s what I first got confused for 20 seconds searching for that “More” option at the very bottom.
“Turns out that it’s on the “More” menu at the very bottom”
The More menu is not at the very bottom of the email window, but at the top of it. But the “Turn on/off highlighting” option is at the bottom of the “More” menu. 🙂 something laughable of how we interpret simple sentence, but leaving a trail for those on my shoe.
I don’t see that option in my More menu. My last option is “Mute” and I don’t see the “Turn off highlighting”. It’s interesting to note that this is only happening for google-apps accounts. The regular gmail works fine and I can see the other option.
Do you have highlighting on the screen at the time? If there’s nothing highlighted (e.g., post-search) then you won’t see that option.
I see the words highlighted and still the option to turn off the highlighting is not there. This definitely looks like a bug. I have screenshots to show how the option is not there even though the highlighting is displayed. The exact same test on my gmail account works, i.e., the “Turn off highlighting” option is displayed, but on the google apps account is not there.
I have the same problem – there’s definitely a bug going on here, because post-search the highlighting simply won’t go away for me.
I have refreshed the page, gone back to my inbox and manually navigated to the email in question (rather than searching for it), signed out and back into gmail, and restarted my whole browser. Every time I go back, the highlighting is still there (and even if I re-search for it and select ‘Turn off highlighting’ it doesn’t budge!). This is a real pain for me, because there are a lot of occurrences of the words I’ve searched for in the email, which is a form letter that I send out several times a week and copy/pasting it takes the highlighting through to my new email!
Come on, gmail, get it together!
Same problem as well! when I click on the more tab highlighting option is not there the last option that comes up at the bottom is Mute. as we all do, I needed to get rid of the yellow highlighted words ASAP so I experimented and found this works: when opening a new email go to the bar on the bottom of the email (where it allows you to bold, underline etc. click on the arrow all the way to the right in the bar and you will see a TX appear (hove over it and it says (REMOVE FORMATTING) so I high highlight the yellow word or words and click TX and the yellow highlighting disappears works for me! Hope this helps until you can find the turnoff highlighting option.