You can use the {description} var in your widget format. I believe that even bolds words that match the search term. It might not be exactly what you want though, as I believe it just uses the first X characters from the text of the page instead of a snippet from the page that is relevant to the search term.
Jon: Thanks for that. I mocked up a quick edit of Pages search on our dev site. As you identified, it does use the meta description or the first text of the main section of the page (rather than the desired location of first mention). It also does bold the search term, if it appears in the text shown, so that’s great.
Definitely a good compromise option I could bring back for consider, though I suspect we’ll need to evaluate a bunch of these pages to make sure their descriptions or starting text are good…
I also tried quickly with Stories. Styling aside, it seems it doesn’t have the same ability as Pages with the {summary} field. If its just pages, may have to rework the page layout to focus on pages.
Gian: Yes, but specifically pulling the first mention of the search term. Imagine instead of a sentence summary: you have a full abstract, the term searched is mentioned in the last sentence, and that’s the phrase/sentence you want to show in search results.