Searching is a pretty common task to do on the web.
But there's some ins and outs that not everybody may know about.
So to search using Safari on your Mac you use the address bar, or address box, at the
top of the browser.
This is the same box you use to type in the web address directly.
For instance, a web address may be macmost.com and that takes you directly to MacMost.com.
However, if you were to just type macmost, not with the dot com after it, you would actually
be performing a search for that term.
So in this case I'm getting results having to do with macmost.
Search terms look different than web addresses because you don't have dot com or dot net
or dot edu or something after them.
They're actually just regular words without a period in them anywhere or a series of words.
So, for instance, you could search for macmost keyboard shortcuts and it knows that this
is a search term not because you've said it specifically but because it knows that a series
of words separated by spaces is not a web address.
So it's making some intelligent guessing as to whether or not you're going directly to
a specific address or you're starting a search.
Now you have some options when it comes to searching.
Notice the Goggle logo here.
The default search engine when you type some search terms and hit return is to search Goggle.
But you can change that.
In Safari Preferences, click on Search, and you get to choose from four different search
engines.
So, for instance, you can use DuckDuckGo or Bing or Yahoo for the search.
If I switch to one of these and then I perform the same search I'm going to get results from
that search engine.
Now this is only true for searches where you are using the address box at the top.
If you were to go directly to the search engine, like if I were to go to Goggle.com, I can
use that search engine there.
So if my default search engine was set to Bing I could just say Goggle.com, go to Goggle
and search there.
Sometimes you get extra functionality at the home pages for the search engines as well.
Sometimes it may be worthwhile to go to them and do the search that way.
Now a problem a lot of people have is knowing exactly what to type to get good search results.
In the early days of the internet you may have to type just one key word or a couple
different key words to get an answer.
So, for instance, you might type numbers pie chart other slice to find out how to do pie
charts with other slices in them.
Here you get some answers.
There's the macmost video, the second one and the third one.
The first one is an excel video for some reason.
You don't have to go and try to figure out which key word to throw in there.
You can just ask your question.
Search engines are very good at figuring out what you want based on natural language.
So if I type in How do I create pie charts in mac Numbers with an other slice?
The results come back pretty much the same.
There's an ad at the top.
Another thing you should know about search engines is to look for search results that
are listed as advertisements.
You can see the first real result here is for the macmost video about exactly that subject.
The title of that video isn't exactly what I asked.
I asked a question here and I got good search results just by using that.
So if you want to find out who started the war of 1812 you could try to figure out like
war of 1812, causes, you know etc.
Or you could ask, like you would as a person.
You usually get your answer there pretty quickly.
Now when you search in Safari in the Mac you'll get some suggestions at the top.
So, for instance here when I just searched for the war of 1812, right away at the top
I get the wikipedia entry, I get some other Goggle suggestions for other things you may
want to look at.
Like there's a timeline, a summary, there's a song apparently.
You also get results in your history.
So if you've recently looked at a page, instead of searching through your history, you can
always just type up here and usually history results will come up in the search engine
as well.
Now there are tons of search tips and tricks.
I've gone over some of them in the past and planning on doing more videos in the future.
I just want to share one with you now because it's the one I use the most often.
If, with the Goggle search, you type site and then colon and then the name of the site
with no spaces.
So, site:macmost.com and the first space is right after that and then type a search term
you'll get search results only from that website.
So you can search any website you want.
You want to just search wikipedia you can do the same thing.
Site:wikipedia.com and then the search terms after it.
That really helps if you are looking for something and you already know what site it's at, you
just want to find the right page.