Remove highlighting of search terms in Plone

If you haven’t noticed already, go to Google and do a quick search for your Plone site. Then click on your site. Plone will then highlight all of the searched terms.

This can be helpful, but also distracting. Plone will try to match the highlight color with the over all color scheme of your site. However, if you want to disable this feature, here’s what you do:

  1. Go to the ZMI → portal_skins → plone_ecmascripts → highlighsearchterms.js
  2. Hit Customize
  3. add return false; just before function highlightSearchTerms(terms, startnode) { and function highlightSearchTermsFromURI() {
  4. Then hit save and you’re done!

The adjustment below will permanently turn off highlighting for your site. On the other hand, if you only want to temporarily turn off the highlighting, simply remove “/?searchterm=mySearchTerm” from the end of the URI in the browser’s address bar.

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