Make Less highlight search patterns instead of italicizing them

To my understanding man uses less as a pager, and when searching for keywords using less it "highlights" keywords with italics. I find that really inconvenient, so I'd like to change this to something like vim's set hlsearch where fond pattern has a different background.

I attempted to run man -P vim systemd but that has quit with error status 1, so it looks like I'm stuck less.

There was nothing that I was able to find in man less that helped (instead I found out that option -G will turn off highlighting all together which is even worst that italics).

That being said does anyone know how to achieve search highlighting( change background color) in man pages?

FYI I run Ubuntu 14.10

I came across this question seems to ask about the same thing but I am not sure if I follow how does this work (LESS_TERMCAP_so). The less man page does not mention this. ( I get strange results with this solution)