There are plenty of iPhone apps available in App Store for content reading and curation purposes. But using the default Safari browser is the most convenient way for reading webpages. You can enable reader mode, increase/decrease font size and keep your favorites on the Start Page to make life easier. However, do you ever wonder how to search a word or phrase while reading a webpage? In this article, I will show you how you can search within a page in Safari iPhone.
Webpage Search Options Safari iPhone
There are two ways you can easily search the content in Safari. In addition, there is also an option to find pages using default search engine.
1. Search Words in a Page from Safari Address Bar
Apple calls the address bar in Safari as Smart Search Field. You can use this to find a word or phrase like the way you do in any Windows or Mac app.
- Launch Safari, open your webpage and tap the address bar.
- Start typing the words or phrase you want to search in the page you are reading.
- When you are typing, you can see Safari showing the suggestions of matches from the current page as “On This Page (x matches)”. Tap on the “Find “your keyword”” showing below that title.
- Now, you can see Safari highlights all the matched words in the page with white label and highlights the current instance in yellow color.
- Use the up or down navigation to find the next match.
- Tap on the lens icon showing before the keywords and you will see two more options – Whole Words and Match Case. Tap the required options to find the match for the whole words or match small or capital case. You can also select both options to filter your search.
- When you are finished, tap “Done” to close the search and continue reading your page.
2. Using Find Selection Pop-up Toolbar
Next option is, simply tap on any word when viewing the webpage in Safari. You can also select a phrase or multiple words and tap on the selection. This will show a pop-up toolbar and tap on the right arrow till you see “Find Selection” option.
Tap that “Find Selection” option to open the search box and highlight all instances of the selected word.
If you want to search the selected text on the web, select “Search Web” option. This will open the search results for the selected text using your default search engine.
2. Search Words in Safari from Share Menu
You can search within a page using another method.
- Open the page in Safari and tap on the share icon showing at the bottom.
- Scroll down a bit on the sharing options and tap on “Find on Page”.
- This will open the search box above the keyboard and you can find the words or phrase as explained in the previous method.
3. Search Pages from Smart Search Filed
Normally, you open Google or Bing and then search a page using your keywords. You can avoid these two steps and use the Smart Search Filed (address bar) to directly search. This will show the search results from your default search engine and you can open the pages from the results. You first need to enable Smart Field Search before start using in Safari.
- Tap the Settings app and then open Safari settings page.
- Under “Search” section, tap “Search Engine” and set your default search engine. After that, tap on “Quick Website Search” option.
- On the next page, turn the switch on against “Quick Website Search” option to enable it.
- Now, open Safari browser and type the keywords with site name in the Smart Search Filed and press “go” key. For example, type WordPress tutorials webnots.com and press “go” key.
- This will show the search results (it shows from Bing for me) and you can open the page from there to continue.
Though it works like automatic suggestions, it will be useful if you have disabled the automatic search engine suggestions option in Safari settings.
Note: The Smart Search Filed in Safari also supports voice input. You can tap on the microphone icon in the address bar to use voice input instead of typing with keyboard.
