Searching the Text Of a Web Page

When searching for information online you may not get your answer right away when you get to a web page. Instead of reading the whole page you can search for text within a page to quickly find what you want. Here's how to search for text on a web page on the Mac in Safari and on the iPhone.

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 search for text on a webpage. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
Now let's say you're searching the web for some information. You find the perfect webpage that seems to have what you want but the page is huge and you need to quickly find the information you want in all of that text. Well, in addition to searching for pages on the web you can also use a browser like Safari to search for text on the webpage. 
So for instance here I am on a WiKipedia webpage. Let's say instead of having to read all of this I want to quickly be able to find the information I want. To find a search feature it may be confusing as to which item to go to. You may think it is under View, for instance, but actually it is under Edit. Under Edit you'll find Find and here the first item is to do a search with your default search engine. But under that there are various options to help you find text on the page. 
We're going to use the first one here, Find. All this does is bring up an extra toolbar at the top. You'll see all of the parts of that toolbar at the right. The main part is the Search Field here. So just type what you want to search for. It is going to look for this text on the page and you can switch between Contains and Begins With. Contains will allow this text to be inside of a word, whereas Begins With will make sure the word starts with this. You could type multiple words but it is going to look for those appearing exactly as they are here. You'll see the word highlighted on the page so you can quickly spot it. It will also show you the number of matches here. So in this case it is the first out of 29 matches. I've got these arrow buttons here that I can easily go to the next match and continue. Notice that it shows me all of the instances of that word. So I can see several of them here. The one in yellow is the current one. So the fourth match is this one here. But you can see there's the fifth and sixth one, and I could use these buttons to get to it. I can go back as well. It will always jump to the part of the page that contains that match. 
If you want to clear the search you can click this X button here. If you want to dismiss the special toolbar you can click the Done button here and it will go away. 
Now the keyboard shortcuts for all of this, if you go to Edit and Find, you'll see that Command F is how you bring up that toolbar. Once you've brought it up you don't have to click on the field to type. You can just start typing. Then you can use Command G for Find Next and Shift Command G to Find Previous instead of clicking those buttons. You can also, instead of the Done button use Shift Command F to dismiss the toolbar. That will still allow you to go to Next and Previous. So, for instance, if I do Command F and then I type my search term I could use Command G to jump to each match. I can use Command Shift F to dismiss the toolbar there. But notice the selection is still there and if I use Command G it's going to continue to jump to each match. I just won't know the number of matches and it's not going to show me the other matches on the page. Only the current one. 
You also have the keyboard shortcut E for Use Selection for Find. But you need to bring up Find first. So I'll bring this up with Command F. Then I'll select some text like this and use Command E and you can see how it places it in there and jumps to the first match. 
Now while this seems straight forward enough on Safari for Mac, you will of course won't find a menu bar or keyboard shortcuts like that when you're using the iPhone or iPad. But you can still do it. It just is in a completely different location. So here I am at a similar Wikipedia page. If I want to search for text on the page I go to the Address Field. Whether you've got it set to be at the top or the bottom it works the same. I'm going to click there and delete what's there. Now, it appears as if I've left the page completely. It's showing me Favorites and other items here. But I haven't left the page yet. So now I can type a search term, like that. Of course I'm going to get Goggle suggestions and all sorts of other things here to go to another page. But if I scroll down I'll find at the bottom On This Page. It will show me here that there are three matches. If I click on Find and then the keyboard there it will jump to first one and notice I get a toolbar that's kind of like the one on the Mac. I see it is one out of 3 there. I've got the little X button to clear it and I've got arrows to jump to each one of these. I've even got this little button to the left here. But it works differently. It will allow me to select whole words as opposed to finding this text is only part of a word and match the case perfectly. I've also got this Done button here to clear it out. That's how you do it on the iPhone. 
I hope you found this useful. thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Searching the Text Of a Web Page”

Sheldon

10 months ago

Thanks bunches

Heather Ramsay

Thanks Gary!

Larry White

I've spent years trying to figure out how to do a text search of a Safari page on an iPhone. Five minutes with you and now I know. Eternally grateful.

gene

Nice. The other way is to click on the Share icon (the one with the box and arrow) and scroll down below the message icons to "Find on page." I remember also that I could swipe right through the second row of icons. Maybe I had to click the "more" button.