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Sometimes I search for an old email in Gmail for the purpose of taking a screenshot, but I would like to remove the yellow highlighting that is added to every match of the search query:

the email body with the search term highlighted

Can I disable it and how?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
37

The option to disable the highlighting ("Turn off highlighting") is located in the "More" menu (indicated with three vertical dots: "⋮") between the search box and the email title

enter image description here

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  • 2
    A really big thank you for this!
    – Tomas Gonzalez
    May 23, 2019 at 0:39
  • 1
    An animated gif is worth a thousand words..
    – stevec
    Nov 15, 2020 at 2:39
  • i feel stupid now.
    – deweydb
    Sep 8, 2022 at 14:53
8

With the most recent Gmail UI, the menu item has changed to an icon which you never would guess toggled highlighting until you actually hover over it to get the help text. It's in the top-right corner next to the printer icon.

enter image description here

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    I don't have that option. I wonder if it was an A/B test
    – Nicola Sap
    Dec 16, 2021 at 11:55
  • I don't have the option either.. really infuriating. As a workaround if you have basic web dev skills you can right click a highlighted word, click inspect, and you should see the CSS class that makes the highlight. Just uncheck the background color and it remove all the highlights for that page
    – jeff carey
    Feb 16 at 4:13
  • @jeffcarey it's still showing up for me. Do you have the printer and "Open in new window" icons? The only non-obfuscated property on the div is its title; if you open the console w/ highlighting active does this return anything? document.querySelector('[title="Turn off highlighting"]');
    – Tobias J
    Feb 17 at 17:00

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