Find Text Within Text

Here’s the scenario: you are doing a web search, and the search summary seems to have everything you are looking for. You click on the site, and you are sent to a page that is incredibly long. However, since the search summary looked good, you now have to read the entire page to find what you’re looking for. It gets even worse when it turns out the information wasn’t what you were looking for.

I’m going to show you an easy way to find out quickly where your search text actually resides on the page the results sent you to.

Let’s pick an example. You have a running bet with your friend that Hamlet, in his most famous soliloquoy, clearly says that he “have shuffled off this mortal coil”. Your friend says that Hamlet has “scuffled off this mortal soil”. Unfortunately, neither of you has a copy of Hamlet on hand, and, well, there’s money on the line.

Time to go to the Internet! You go to a search engine such as Google. In the search query box, you type in “Hamlet Soliloquoy” without the quotes. It’s a home run! Thousands of pages spring up. The first page you go to is the complete text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (don’t worry… here’s where you learn the nifty trick!)

It’s time to find out who’s right. On the web page in question, go to Edit at the top of the browser. Then, scroll down to Find. Or, if you like keyboard shortcuts, hit Ctrl and F at the same time. Either method will pop open a window on your screen that will enable you to type in the text you are looking for:

The first time around, we’ll type in “scuffled”. If you get a message that says “Finished searching through the document”, or “no matching text found”, then it’s apparent that the text never occurs on the page. Let’s do the above steps again, except this time, we’ll search for “shuffled”. If it finds text, it will highlight it for you, as seen below:

Well it looks like you were right indeed. And the whole process only took a few seconds to find out, as opposed to a whole weekend of sifting through web sites that didn’t have what you were looking for. This process can be transferred to any example.

Happy searching!