drewp

So I read that google chrome shows the positions of in-page search results on the page's scrollbar:

(image from usabilitypost)

This is something David McClosky and I put into skim 5 years ago. Our version enlarged up the scrollbar so it was wide enough to show the horizontal positions of the matches too. Then we made multiple matches appear at once, and let the user click any word to add it to the search. You'd often type one word, jump around to the neighborhoods where it matched, and then click a few more relevant words to make the preview denser.

Ironically, I described it back then as looking like a Google cached page with search terms highlighted in different colors, but zoomed out. In the code, the widget is called "birdseye".

Greg at Raizlabs has two more variations: ABC and heatmap