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Safari : Using Google Search

If you've ever used Google as your search engine, you know how amazing it is. If you haven't yet, once you do you might never use anything else. Because it's so great (it even figures out if you've misspelled something you're looking for), 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).

Type your search term in this little field. To delete whatever is in there, click the X. Put quotation marks around words that should be found together, as explained below.

With quotation marks around a phrase, Google will find only those pages where those two words are next to each other. Notice with quotation marks, Google found 33 pages.

Without quotation marks, Google displays 88 pages because it finds every page that has the word "brenda" on it and the word "euland," whether they are next to each other or not.

Limit your search even more
Use Boolean operators to limit your search. That is, 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 to appear on a page.
Do not put a space after the + or -.

  • A search for just the word safari gave me 2,370,000 results.

  • A search for safari +apple -africa gave me only 94,300 results, and pages about Apple's Safari were right at the top.

  • A search for safari +browser +apple -africa gave me only 47,900 results, again with Apple's Safari at the very top.

Extra tips
Here are a couple of handy menus for Google.

Click on the tiny magnifying tool and triangle in the Google field and you'll get a menu listing the last ten searches you did in Google, as shown to the right. Safari maintains this list no matter how many windows you open or even if you quit Safari.

Select a word or phrase on any web page, then Control-click on that word. A contextual menu will appear with the option to do a "Google Search," as shown to the right. Choose it and the new results will appear instantly.


Tollett/Williams, LITTLE MAC IAPPS BOOK, © 2003 John Tollett and Robin Williams. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Peachpit Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Click Here to buy this book at a 30% discount

 


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