Search Sites Directly With Safari Quick Website Search

Learn how to use Quick Website Search on your Mac, iPhone and iPad to skip search engines and get results directly from your favorite websites. This saves time and increases privacy.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Quick Website Search on your Mac and your iPhone. 
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So Safari has this cool built-in feature that few people use called Quick Website Search. Here's how it works. Let's say you go to a website like Wikipedia here. You notice that there is a search on this website. You don't have to use the search field here and search the entire internet. You can actually use the search field right there. But wouldn't it be great to be able to just jump right into a search and not have to go to the site first. Well, you can! 
The first step is actually go to the website at least once and use the search functionality built-in. So let's just do a quick search for apple here in Wikipedia. Now that we've done that search we can go and use the website name and do a regular search right from the address bar at the top. So what I can do is start with the name of the website. Instead of just going to the site there I could actually use Space and then type a search term. Then you'll see right here Search and the website domain. So just click on that very first item. What's going to happen is we're going to end up at the search result for that site. It's going to skip Goggle or whatever search engine you're using altogether and just use the website's actual search. 
So, for instance, let's go to my site. You can see I've got search here for the top as well. Now, let's search for something. You could see here there's a custom set of search results. This isn't using Goggle or any search engine. It's just the internal search for the site. So now if I wanted to search MacMost without having to go to MacMost at all I can go to macmost.com space and then I could type something. You could see here it has Search macmost.com. That tells you that it knows what to do. It knows to do a Quick Search. Let's select that and you'll see the results come up directly from the site skipping search engines completely. 
If you go into Safari Preferences here then go to Search. You'll see Enable Quick Website Search. Make sure you have that turned on and then you can click on Manage Websites. Here you can see a list of all the websites that are recognized for this function. So these are the websites where I have actually done that search. If I want to select on and remove it I can. But you can't add one here. So the way to add Quick Website Search is always just to go to the site, find the Search function there, do a basic search, and now when you want to use it just type the name of the site, use a space after it, and them type something that you want to search for. Click here to jump right to a search right on that website. You'll see here that it's added the site to the list now. 
Better yet you usually don't need to type the entire domain name. So, for instance, if I just typed macmost space without the dot com and then something after it you could see I get that result here. You might have to click on this or use the down arrow to get there and then Return to select it. If you simply press return here it would still search Goggle. 
The same thing works on the iPhone and the iPad. So in Safari here I can, for instance, type macmost space then search for something here. You'll see the top result has Search macmost.com. If I select that then it will go directly to the search results for that site. In the Settings app, under Safari, you can checkout Quick Website Search. You'll see Quick Website Search. You can turn it On or Off. You could also see the sites there. You could swipe to Delete anyone you want. Now in order for this to work the website itself has to have some code on it to point Safari in the right direction to tell it how to perform a search. It's a really easy code to add. I've done it for macmost.com and most websites should have it. But you can still come across some pretty big websites that don't seem to take advantage of this. But for those that do it's great. Not only does it allow you to quickly focus your search results on one site but choosing the site's own search engine you're skipping a whole step. You're not going to Goggle or anywhere else at all. You'll usually get much more relevant results quicker. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Search Sites Directly With Safari Quick Website Search”

Cyndi Feeney

3 years ago

Thank you again big time for most valuable and time saving tips. Will practice this tip for quick searches.

Matthew Brandt

Hi. I’ve tried this several times on my iPad and iPhone but when I search, Google pops up with my query instead of the website. I tried it with MacMost, Apple, and Wikipedia. Additionally, Google and MacMost are the only two sites listed in Safari Quick Website Search settings. Am I doing something incorrectly? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Matthew: When you search, use something like "MacMost iPad" and then look for the suggestion under it to search only that site. Tap that.

Hi Gary, thanks for responding. I figured out what I was doing wrong. After typing my query into the search bar, I was hitting the return button. That always brought up Google search results. When I clicked the bar with Search MacMost.com for “iPad”, directly below the search bar, it worked perfectly. Thanks again.

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Search Sites Directly With Safari Quick Website Search

Comments: 4 Responses to “Search Sites Directly With Safari Quick Website Search”

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