How To Search a Single Website

If you know the information or item you want is on a specific site, there are quicker ways to get to it besides a general web search. Most websites allow you to search inside them, and even search engines allow you to narrow things down.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to a search single website for information.
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So it's pretty easy to search the entire web. But what if you already know that the information you want is on a website. You can search just that website and many different ways. The easiest way to do that is if the website itself has a Search function. Usually it's right there at the top of the page. For instance MacMost has one right here at the top. If you want to find something at macmost.com you can just search for it using this box right here. You're not only going to get results that are from just macmost.com but they will be presented inside the website, not inside of some sort of  Goggle search page. For instance macmost.com will focus on the videos and it will also mix in, sometimes, Forum questions and responses. You get to see a little thumbnail of the video and a description and everything. Other websites have the same thing. 
At the top of every Wikipedia page is a Search box and you could just use that and you're probably going to get results inside of Wikipedia. It will even know if your search result matches a page perfectly and just take you right to it. Shopping sites, of course, feature a Search box right at the top and you can just search right there and of course you're only going to get results inside that site. Some sites hide the Search box a little bit. In this case, on the Apple site, you get a button right here that you can click. Once you do it reveals the Search box right there and you can then use it. But, of course, you're still only going to get a custom result just from this one site. 
Now if a website doesn't have a search box you can still search that website using Goggle or any other Search Engine. So type the search term or terms as you would normally but then type site colon and then the website domain just like that with no spaces around the colon. Then when you search you're going to get results that are just for that one website although you may still get ads depending upon the search engine. If you go into Settings and then change the Search Engine to something else it will still work. All major Search Engines use the same technique. So if I change it to Duck Duck Go you can see I'm still going to get some ads here at the top. The actual results are all going to be from macmost.com. 
One of the interesting things about using the site: solution is if you type OR and then another site:, like that, and you'll get results from both sites but nothing else. You can also use this to Search Subdomains. So, for instance, if I were to use Apple.com I can get results throughout all Apple.com. But if instead I were to use Discussions.Apple.com I'm only going to get results for that one subsite. So it is a quick way to search just the Discussion part of Apple.com.  Of course you could also just go to Discussions@Apple.com and notice here in addition to the main search for of Apple.com there is also a search specific to the Discussions part of the site. Other websites may offer this as well. As a matter of fact if you go to Amazon and you search for something here notice that you can select to search all of Amazon or just a specific department. 
Likewise if you go to YouTube.com and you search here at the top you're going to get results for all of YouTube. But you can go to a specific channel. Let's go here to one of my videos and now if I click here to go to the channel, notice that there is this nav bar here at the top and there is a Search button here on the right side of the nav bar. I can click that, search for something, it will only search this one YouTube channel.
Another way to search a website it to do something called Quick Website Search in Safari. So if I were to type macmost.com and then press Return it would go to the site. But if I press Spacebar then I get a space, I can type something else, like that. Now pressing Return is going to do a Goggle search for those two terms right there. You can see it says Search Goggle. But if I look underneath there is Search macmost.com for iMovie. Let's click that. What I'm going to get is a search result just as if I had typed iMovie here in the Search Box for macmost. The same thing for Wikipedia. If I type
Wikipedia.org space and then something like that you can see I get Search Wikipedia.org and actually a bunch of different options right here that I can choose from. Quick Website Search should be enabled by default. But go into Safari Settings, then under Search check to make sure it is enabled. You can also manage the websites. So this is list of websites that I can do Quick Websites Search for. Why is the list so small? Well, you had to have visited the website and done a search there in the first place in order for this to be activated. This is because your Safari browser can't know about every site on the internet about whether Quick Website Search is available. But using this search functionality built into it that will allow it to determine whether or not it can do this and it will add it to the list. You can remove something from the list. I'm not sure why you would want to. But at least here you can see which websites had this as a possibility. If you don't see one listed here go to that site, try to use its own search functionality and see if it gets added. 
The advantage of Quick Website Search is you don't need to go to the website first then use the Search box. You can just type the domain name, space, and the search term and then be able to do the search as your first step. 
Now also note that many sites have specific features for search. For instance, if I look at the bottom of the Apple.com website there is a bunch of different navigation links here and there is Find a Store. So I can do a search for an Apple Store using this special form. At macmost.com I can click on the video tutorials item in the Nav Bar and then I see video tutorials by category. I can go to a specific category like that and just see those videos. But also at the bottom right I see a list of different navigation options including a Site Map and a Video List which gives me a chronological list of all the videos at the site. 
Which brings up the idea of searching a single page. See how long this page is. It is huge. Well you can search just the text on this page by not doing a search but a Find. If you look under Edit there is Find and Goggle Search is Option Command F but a regular Command F is just Find. Command F gives me this little Search box here. I can change from Contains to Begins With if I want and search for a term. So I'll search for iMovie here and it is going to show 107 matches. I can use the little arrow buttons right here to go between them. I can use Done to Dismiss or, of course, I could just click on a link at that point to go to where I want. So it is useful on a big page like this. It is also useful on a page of information like this where I can do Command F, search for a word like that, see all the different matches and jump to a specific part of the page. 
So I hope this makes it easier for you to search for information on the web. Thanks for watching.
How To Search a Single Website

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