Finding Text in Safari

Friday, July 30 2010

By: chrisb

Highlighting your find results

The Find panel
Click to see a larger image

Google (or some other search engine) is usually the jumping off point for finding information on the web. The way it normally works for me, I scan down the first page of search results looking in the summary for what I think will be the answer to my query. Then I Command-click the results that look interesting to open them in their own tabs. Once I've opened a few new tabs with results pages, I go through those tabs looking for the information I want.

Sometimes the text from the search results summary isn't readily apparent on the opened web page. If that is the case, you have to search through the page to find what you are looking for. To accomplish this quickly, use Safari's Find function to locate your text.

You've probably used Find before in a word processor. The way Find normally works, each time you choose Find, you are jumped to the next occurrence of your Find query. Safari, however, has a different trick for finding text on a web page.

You can access Find from the Menu Bar by going to Edit / Find / Find..., or you can use the much simpler Command-F. Find drops down a small panel below your tabs. You have a search field where you type the text you are looking for on the page. As you are typing, Safari dims the web page and highlights all of the text that matches your search query, with the first match highlighted in yellow.

You can use the forward and backward arrows on the Find panel to move the yellow highlighted match through the search results on the web page. If the match is below the part of the page you can see, Safari will scroll down so you can see the results.

You can test this quickly right now by typing Command-F and entering any word in the search field and watching the results pop up.