MacMost Now 377: Search Within Web Pages

You can use Find to search within a Web page in Safari or any browser. This simple technique can make it much easier to locate information.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary from MacMost Now, In today's episode I'm going to show you how to search inside of web pages with Safari.
Now to a lot of people you already now about this functionality, but do you use it to it's fullest, you can search inside a web page in Safari. This is different than actually searching for something on the web or even searching for something in your history like you can do in Safari. This is actually searching for a piece of text on the page you are looking at. So why would you want to do that it's all right there right? Well it actually comes in very handy, let me show you.
OK let's start with MacMost as an example, you go to the MacMost home page and you say 'you know I know there's this key board short cut pdf that I can print out, it's somewhere on MacMost, I remember them tweeting about it, wonder where it is. Well I bet it's listed on the front page but look there's a lot of stuff on the front page, how can I find it? well I can read through all the different items and see if I can find it here or I can simply use command F which will open up this little search window here then I can type in what I want.' 
Let's type in shortcut, I can see there is one match it actually takes me right to it and I can see ah printable keyboard shortcut page. So I was very quickly able to find what I wanted here. Now if I wanted to find out how to subscribe to the news letter, type newsletter you just start typing it and I come to a link to MacMost newsletter. Actually it shows that there are five matches there and I can see that there is a link at the top of the page as well as one there one on the right so there's plenty of laces I can find that.
Also say if I want to go and say I want to go and contact somebody this is one of the most useful things, you're on a website and say I want to contact the website owner, so instead of trying to look for contact information there, just type contact and you can see it comes right to contact MacMost. Some pages you have to look for email or some other word but it's a lot quicker than actually reading through it. This is a relatively short page some are much longer.
So here's another example say I want to know I remember NASA is launching some sort of rocket to go to Jupiter soon I search for NASA rocket and I come up with a launch schedule. Now I can read through each one of these entries to find out which one is the one going to Jupiter or I can just do command F, search for Jupiter and even as I start to type I see it jumps right to the August 5th 2011 launch of the Juno mission and that's exactly what I was looking for, much quicker than actually reading through all the previous entries to get down to what I wanted. 
Find is also useful for confirming whether something is or isn't on a web page. Say you're reading an article and you want see if the author has a twitter account but you don't see it there. Instead of assuming it's not there maybe do a quick search for the word twitter and it might be in some unlikely place on that web page.
Sometimes it even helps to narrow down a Google search. So for instance you search for something very specific on Google and you come up with a web page of results but doesn't look like the first couple actually match what you want, you're looking for a very specific word you can do a find on that page of search results for that word to maybe jump down to the 7th or 8th entry on that page that actually show it in the page description. 
So check out using find inside of a web page, it's a tool that I use constantly throughout the day as I search the web and once you realize it's there and realize that you can use it for some things you'll find that you're can use it all the time too.
Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig for MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 377: Search Within Web Pages

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