IE8 - for some search results the title underline ITSELF is bold

how to achieve it?

[SilverSpirit]

So, I downloaded IE8 - yet another software 'upgrade' that is rather a nuisance, I think. And when I search using Google or Yahoo (NOT live.com), I am seeing some search results with bold underline in the title.

All titles are underlined, but in some cases that underline is also bold.

It does not occur systematically under all titles that have the search words in them.

It occurs under all AdWords / Overtuyre ads.

Have you noticed that, and how can I also have a bold underline under my site :-P ?

[tedster]

Very sharp eyes there, SilverSpirit. We normally don't allow specific search terms at all on WebmasterWorld - so in this case, let's make an excpetion and study two relatively neutral searches - the Google Search on [widgets] and the Google Search on [browser]. The [browser] search is particularly interesting because only some of the Adwords use the bold line for an underline

At first, whenever I saw IE8 displaying a bold line for the underline, I also saw an "onmousedown" tracking script in the source code. But then I found some counterexamples, so that's not it.

There's a lot to sort out in the source code here - I'm certainly hoping we can find what causes IE8 to bold the underline in some cases, and whether this is simply an effect of IE8 itself, or if it's something that Yahoo and Google are intentionally testing.

[SilverSpirit]

3 days later, I am surprised that no one has commented. IE8 will be the most widely used browser (like it or not) and these bold underline results really stand out from the rest.

[phranque]

i'm seeing this in FF 3.0.10 for all google results except LBC and news.
with multi-word search phrases any words or stems of words in the phrase are highlighted.

no highlighting with ff/yahoo...

[tedster]

I see significant differences between IE8 and FF 3.0.10 in the way they bold the underline itself.

In IE8, it looks like either the entire title has a bold underline or the entire title has a normal weight underline. It doesn't seem to matter how many or few characters are in bolde There are titles that have no bold words at all in the title, but the underline is still bold.

In FF 3.0.10, the underline is consistently bold if the characters above it are bold. The boldness of the underline varies within even a single title.

[tedster]

This issue fascinates me, but it is difficult to untangle and my time has been limited. There's no doubt that getting a bold underline instead of a regular underline will help catch the search user's eye.

Anyone else working on it? Any insights?