But why did you want it removed / dislike it

Because I don't want to suddenly move on some place on a page. I want to start on top of the page regardless what Google believes is best for me. And what pissed me off was that Google decided that this feature is mandatory and I can't disable it.

You seem to have misunderstood the feature. Google doesn’t decide anything - the person sharing the text with you, or the search result referencing that text, is what uses the feature to guide you to the right location.

Sometimes I wonder if people enjoy being blindly knee jerk reactionary.

No I did not misunderstand the feature, it was Google who pushed it on me. In Google, in its search engine. And I was not able to disable it. Sorry that I don't like to be told what I want to see.

This is absurd. Do you also wish to disable anchor tag navigation?

What about just keeping existing flags in Chrome [0] which used to be there? Is it too much to ask? I don't want to use Google search + Chrome so I can get scrolled into middle of a page without any context with random highlighted text, because Google search believes this is what I want to see.

Thankfully switching to Brave solved my issue and this stupid feature is disabled.

[0] https://perishablepress.com/disable-chrome-scrolltotextfragm...

Oh, okay I see your problem now. I forgot that Google Search will take advantage of the browser feature to scroll-to-text.

I think most in the comment chain were thinking of the case of sending a link to a friend where you want them to be scrolled to some specific text. I often want to create these links for others when linking to long pages, or technical documentation.

I haven’t tried Brave (the crypto stuff puts me off), but if you’re interested in a good alternative to Google Search (that doesn’t link text fragments) you should check out Kagi. It’s paid, but it’s worth funding a Google competitor on principle IMO.

Why do you even use a search engine? Might as well just type random domains into your address bar and hope you chance upon what you were looking for.

Bing does not force me to scroll on text. DuckDuckGo does not force me to scroll on text. Yandex does not force me to scroll on text....

Only Google Search does that. What a knee jerk response...

It makes it more cumbersome to copy the URL