Most all browsers today have build in search capabilities and Safari is no different. No need to browse to Google or Yahoo’s home page to start your search as you can quickly enter your search phrase into the browser and hit search, propelling you closer to item your looking for. Unfortunately, Safari web search doesn’t include some of the great spotlight search functions like auto-suggest or previews of some of the information you’re looking for. But to our great luck there is a Safari plug-in that makes such capabilities available.

ENHANCE YOUR SEARCH: INQUISITOR

Inquisitor is a Safari plug-in that will provide you with Spotlight like search functionality for your web searches. One of the great things about Inquisitor is how fast it is. Start typing anything into the search field and auto-suggest items with details about the pages it is suggesting start popping up below the search field. Inquisitors suggestions are also great examples of how to setup your search phrases to get optimal web search results.

SETUP

After you’ve downloaded and installed Inquisitor you can fire up Safari, start a new search in the browser search field, and see how Inquisitor works. If you’d like to change some of the settings for Inquisitor select Preferences from the Safari menu and then click the Search tab. Here you can add the amount of suggestions displayed, what search engine to use, or other search related features.

Be sure to check out the other Safari Hints and Tips articles to take full advantage of Keyboard Shortcuts and learn how to let Safari read the web for you.

You may have noticed a menu item in many of your applications called Services. This is OSX’s way of letting you know how you can make applications interact with each other. One feature of Services that I find both interesting and useful in Safari is the Speech option.

START READING

I often find myself reading news articles from multiple news sources online that are covering the same article. I like to see how they’re different and see if one media source is applying any additional information that another may be missing. Safari and Mac OSX Speech option is perfect to allow me to essentially read two articles at once. Safari reads out loud the first article while I continue on to the next one.To get Safari to start reading for you:

1. Find a website you’d like Safari to read back to you
2. Select the text you’d like to read
3. Click Safari on the menu bar
4. Highlight Services, Speech, and then click “Start Speaking Text”

Thats all it takes and your mac will quickly start reading back to you the contents of the website. This is a great way to get multiple things done at once. I personally enjoy having Safari read back recipes to me while I’m cooking, or reading back blog articles on my google reader page. How would you use this feature? Don’t forget, you can create a keyboard shortcut to Start Speaking Text with just a few clicks on the keyboard.

We’ve mentioned previously how convenient the new custom dashboard widget creation feature in Safari is but have a few additional tips on ways that you can get more out of using the browser.

One Click - Tabbed Browsing

One of the greatest things about Safari is how easy it is to open multiple tabs of websites you’re interested in visiting. I personally will open links from articles I’m reading in new tabs so that I’m not pulled away from the article until I finished reading it. After finishing, I then can click through the open tabs and review the links that the article references.

Safari makes this quick and easy. With a mighty mouse, or any mouse with a scroll wheel button, you can open links in new tabs by clicking them with the center scroll wheel. This can also be accomplished by cmd+click any link. A new tab will open and load the link but the focus of the browser stays on the article you’re currently reading.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS - OPEN BOOKMARKS

Safari also provides a great and easy way to open your bookmarks. To open the any of the bookmarks on your bookmark bar press cmd+ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. Command+1 will open the bookmark furthest to the left and so on moving along the number lines.

If you want to open these in new tabs, be sure to press cmd+t to open a new tab and then cmd+1 to open the first bookmark in the new tab.

Be sure to check back for more hints and tips in Safari Hints and Tips Part 2

KEYBOARD SHORTCUT SUMMARY:

• command+click = Open link in new tab
• command+t and command +1 = Open Bookmark 1 in New Tab
  
• command+1 = bookmark 1
• command+2 = bookmark 2
• command+3 = bookmark 3
• command+4 = bookmark 4
  
• command+5 = bookmark 5
  
• command+6 = bookmark 6
  
• command+7 = bookmark 7
  
• command+8 = bookmark 8
  
• command+9 = bookmark 9
• command+0 = bookmark 10

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One of the many great features of Apple’s new OS X 10.5 Leopard that gets overlooked or under used is the ability to quickly and easily create custom dashboard widgets of areas of websites that you visit often or check for important information. You may have noticed a new button in Safari that includes a dotted square line and a pair of scissors. Clicking this will allow you to select a section of the current website you’re viewing and then clicking the “add” button that will appear to place the selected portion of the website on your dashboard widget.

Dashboard was something added in previous versions of OS X but not often used by many Mac owners. Personally, I never used Dashboard before the ability to created widgets of information that I often access. I us it to check sports scores and news information and simply clicking the Dashboard keyboard function to get updates on game scores saves me the time of browsing to the site itself to check the score.

I also live close to the movie theaters and the widget I created from google’s movie listing for the local theater has been useful a number of times. Don’t forget to make widgets of those sections of the web that you visit often and the information you seek will now be just one click away. How have you used the new widget creation function? What widgets have you made?