STR: ==== Use case was having a big JSON embedded as JS in a webpage. I wanted to look up if a certain string was inside the JSON string. So I searched for that string. This was not really helpful because the search highlights the whole JSON string, but the matched part is not highlighted at all. In the end I copied the whole html code into a text editor which has search hightlight for the matches. AR: === At the moment a text search in the Inspector just highlights the whole node. I think that's good, especially when doing CSS class or identifier searches. ER: === But I think it would be good if also the matched part would be hightlighed in second highlight color. This would be best for text searches, but I guess it would also be helpful when searching for CSS selectors like classes or identifiers because sometime the nodes are just huge, or have many CSS classes on it etc. It would help the eye to orientate. See screenshot to get an idea of what I mean.

Although its title isn't very explanatory, I think bug 1259390 is what you want here. It's about highlighting the part of the string that matched the search query (as well as not necessarily selecting the node in the inspector). So I'm going to close this bug as a duplicate and add your comment over in the other bug. Thanks!