When you’re looking for a particular word, phrase, or even series of characters on a website, locating it simply by scanning with your eyes can be challenging among all the text on the page. That’s why applications have a Find command.

Find is a way of searching for text on a page or in a document. You may be familiar with this command in a document-based application like Word or Pages. However, the command is also available in web browsers, both desktop and mobile, so you can seek out text on the current webpage.

Safari on Mac

On the Mac, the Find command is consistently in the Edit menu and has the keyboard shortcut Command+F. The interface in most browsers is minimal and Safari is no different.

The application presents a separate bar below the Tab Bar with a text field and options just above the top right corner of the webpage. When you enter a search query, Safari highlights the results and dims the rest of the page.

You can toggle between finding words that “begin with” your query or “contain” it. Use the right and left arrows to step from one occurrence to the next or previous, or use the shortcuts Command+G and Shift+Command+G, respectively.

Click Done or press Escape to close the Find bar and return the page to normal. After closing the bar, if you didn’t clear your query, you can still use the Find Next and Find Previous commands to their respective effect. Safari won’t dim the page but will still scroll to and highlight results, one at a time.

Safari on iPhone + iPad

On iPhone and iPad, if you have an external keyboard connected, all the same keyboard shortcuts work. For the rest of us, though, since there isn’t a menu bar, the Find command is a little more hidden.

For several versions of iOS, the only way to access Find for a given page was to type the query into the address bar and look for On This Page at the bottom. (It still works.) This pulls up the Find interface, similar to that of the Mac.

One missing feature is a toggle to Begins With, but there are instead choices of Whole Words or Match Case (choose one or both) when you tap the .

As of iOS 12, you can also find Find on Page as an action in the Share Sheet. Tap the Share button , scroll down, and tap Find On Page. Then, enter your query.

In current versions of iOS, you can change the arrangement of actions in the Share Sheet by first making them favorites. Tap Share, scroll down to the bottom, and tap Edit Actions. Then, tap the ⊕ next to Find on Page and it jumps to Favorites at the top.

Rearrange favorites as you wish by dragging the thumb on the right side of the item. Tap the ⊖ and then Remove to return an action to its default position below.

If you’re in a hurry, there’s no need to spend extra time reading a page to find specific text. Just pop up Find and let your device do the searching.