Use Find On Page

Use "Find On Page"

You search the Internet for information. You're doing a paper on Thomas Jefferson's penmanship, for example, and you want to find only those articles that are most relevant to your research.

You type "Thomas Jefferson penmanship" into your favorite search engine, and the search naturally returns about 190,000 items. So you click on a link or two, only to find Web pages that can only be described as, well, "academic." Apparently, many Thomas Jefferson buffs aren't afraid of a word processor.

Here's where the "find on page" feature of Internet Explorer really comes in handy. Rather than read through the entire five, ten, or twenty pages of text, you can quickly locate instances of the word "penmanship" in the Web page.

All you have to do is choose Edit | Find (on this page), and then enter the search term in the Find dialog box. Choose Find Next to commence the search, as shown in Figure 12-22.

Figure 12-22. Search a wordy site to pinpoint exactly the information you need.

Most people understand how this works in an application like Word or Excel; they are surprised to discover the same feature is available for Internet Explorer.