Safari s Google Search

Safari's Google Search

If you've ever used Google as your search engine, you know how amazing it is. Because it's so great, Apple has included it in your Safari toolbar. Use it just as you would if you went directly to the Google.com site. Here are a few extra tips for searching (these tips apply to any search tool, actually).

If you don't see the Google search field in your toolbar, go to the View menu and choose "Customize Address Bar…"

Limit your search for best results

• Put quotation marks around words that should be searched together, as one term. With quotation marks around a phrase, Google will find only those pages where the words in quotes are next to each other. The image search below found 58 matches without using quotation marks. With quotation marks, Google found 38 matches.

Click the magnifying glass icon to open a pop-up menu of recent searches. Choose the last item to "Clear Recent Searches" from the list.

Limit your search even more

Use Boolean operators to limit your search. Put a + sign in front of any word or phrase (in quotation marks) that you want to make sure Google finds; put a -- sign in front of any word that you do not want included in the search results. Do not put a space after the + or .

A search for safari +browser +apple africa gave "only" 574,000 results.

A search for safari gave 33,200,000 results.

Safari search tips

• Select a word or phrase on any web page, then Control-click on that word. A contextual menu opens with the options to "Search in Spotlight, Search in Google, or Look Up in Dictionary." Spotlight is the powerful new search feature built in to Tiger (Mac OS X v10.4).
  
  

  

• When you want to search for a keyword or phrase on a long, lengthy web page, press Command F to open the "Find" dialog. Type the keyword you're looking for, then press the "Next" button. The first occurance of the keyword that's visible in the Safari window is highlighted. Keep clicking "Next" to find other occurences.
  
  

Tip

If more than one person uses your computer, or if you have visitors or grandkids using it, set up another user. Then nobody can mess with your bookmarkseach user will have his own set of Safari bookmarks.