9 Safari Search Tips

Learn how to use search results SnapBack, search on just one site, find text on web pages and much more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some Safari search tips. 
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So when you want to search in Safari usually you just go up to the field at the top of the browser. You type in your search term, press Return and you get results in the search engine of your choice. Now if you're doing that to research a topic a special feature in Safari that comes in handy is SnapBack. So let's go down into one of the pages for this result here. Let's say I continue to dive down into other pages. At some point I decide I want to go back to the search results. Now I could just do the search again. I could use the Back button here and go back a few times or click and hold and then find the search result's page and go back to that. But there is also something called SnapBack. If you go to History you'll see Search Results SnapBack and you can use this menu item, or the keyboard shortcut Option Command S, and it takes you right back to the Search Results Page. Now this only works if you're still in the same tab as you were before. If, for instance, I were to Command click on the result here and open up a new tab you see that I don't have Search Results SnapBack because the history here doesn't contain the page with the search results. That's back here at this tab. 
Now it also doesn't work if you skip the Search Results Page. So here I get a suggestion. Instead of going to the Search Results I'm going to jump right to that suggestion. There is no Search Results Page in my history for me to jump back to. 
Now you can also change your Search Engine by going to Safari, Settings, and then under Search you get the choice of five different Search Engines. Now this is just the default Search Engine. So if I change it to one it's just the results that I now get if I type something here and press Return. It doesn't restrict me from going to a completely different search engine just by going to the engine itself. Like that. So you could still go to any search engine you want. It's just what you get if you use the shortcut of just typing the search term in the address field. 
Now sometimes when you get to a page like this you still haven't found the information you want. But you know it is somewhere on that page. You could search on a webpage by using Command F or just going to Edit, and then Find, and then use Find right here. Notice that Option Command F will actually use a web search. But Command F just searches on the page. You can search for something that begins with or contains and you can type it like that and jump right to the different results. You can see here I've got one of four matches. I can go through all four matches right here and loop back. 
If you know the information you want is on a certain website you can search that a couple of ways. One is to use the Quick Website's Search feature. To use that type the name of the website. For instance this will work with MacMost. So if I just type the name of the site, you don't need to include dot com, I just go space and then I type the search term after that. One of the results you'll see shows Search macmost.com and then it usually shows an icon for that site and you can select the search right here. It will jump right to the site. You can actually use the site's search function, not Goggle or whatever you've got chosen as your default search engine. It uses the site's specific Search functionality. So in the case of MacMost it's the equivalent to typing the search term up here after you go to the site. 
Now for this to work you had to have visited the site previously and the website has to have this functionality built-in and then tell Safari that it has Quick Website Search. If you go to Safari, Settings and then to Search you'll see Enable Quick Website Search and you can click Manage Website. This will list all the sites that you visited that have signaled to Safari that it has this function. You could use anyone of these. So, for instance, it's here for Wikipedia. So if I were to type Wikipedia space and then the topic like that notice I've got the specific search Wikipedia.org and I could search for the exact term I want or maybe some other suggestions as well. Then it will jump right to the search results specific to that site. So, in other words, just like I typed the search term right here. 
Also notice in the list you might find other search engines. There's Goggle and there's DuckDuckGo. So even though I've got Goggle set as my default search engine here, I could actually search DuckDuckGo by typing it, space, and then the term. Like that. You'll see Search DuckDuckGo.com for, and my term, and it's like I was using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. I just skipped the part where I went to the main page and then typed the search result and did it all here in the Search Bar.
Now what happens if a site doesn't have the Quick Website Search enabled. Well, you could still search just that site. All you need to do is type Site and then a colon and then the site with no space in-between. Then a space and then the search term. What site colon will signal to any search engine is to only give you search results for that specific domain. So now I get results that are just that Apple.com but, you know, the ads are still from any site. This isn't specific to Safari. This is a general search engine thing. So Safari is passing this along to the Search Engine and it's the Search Engine that is using site colon to only give you the results from that one site. 
Now sometimes you're searching for something and you know you've already been to the page before. In that case you could just go to your History. Of course your History can be really long and it could be hard to find something there. So instead you can search your own history. Now this will happen if you just do a search. You'll get Bookmarks & History here at the bottom. But you can also go to History, Show All History or use the keyboard shortcut and there's a search box here at the top right. Just type your search term and you'll see all of the results that you have in your History that matches that. This also makes it possible to use Bookmarks less. So instead of having a ton of bookmarks that you can't really find useful because there are too many to look through, you can just rely on your Search History and if by chance you want to go back to a webpage you visited a few days ago you can just search for it in there and find it rather than bookmarking thinking you may or may not need to get back to that page in the future. 
Now speaking of Bookmarks you can do the same for bookmarks. So there are three ways to search your bookmarks. One was to use the Search Field, like I showed before. You could also go to Bookmarks and instead of going to Show Bookmarks, go to Edit Bookmarks. This brings up a page very similar to your History List and you can search your bookmarks here for something that matches. You could also go to Show The Bookmarks Sidebar. Now it doesn't look like there is a search here. But if you scroll down it will reveal a bookmarks search field at the top.
Now one more quick tip that's not really that useful unless you're one of those people that has tons of tabs open all the time. You could actually search your Tabs. It just searches for the titles. But if you've kind of lost a tab and you want to find it really easily you can find a tab one of two ways. One is to just do a normal search and you've got Switch to Tab right there so it finds it that way. You could also go to View, Show Tab Overview or the keyboard shortcut there. When you're in Tab Overview you could use the Search Field at the top to find a page that is a match in the title. 
So there are some quick Safari search tips. I hope you found it useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “9 Safari Search Tips”

Jonathan

1 year ago

Regarding default search engines, I'm curious which one do you use as your default and why? I'm thinking of switching from Google to DuckDuckGo and am wondering what the advantages and disadvantages are of each. Lot's of great tips in this video just like all of your others. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Jonathan: I use Google. I want to see the results most of the world sees when I research things for MacMost and such. But if I wasn't doing that kind of research, I might use DuckDuckGo instead.

Paul

This was excellent.

Comments Closed.

9 Safari Search Tips

Comments: 3 Responses to “9 Safari Search Tips”

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