How to Find Words on a Page

Finding a specific word or phrase on a page with a boatload of information on it can prove to be a real pain, but a pain countless people have to endure quite often. Thankfully, most applications and programs designed for computers – from word processors such as Microsoft Word to internet browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari and everything in between – have a Find feature built into them. The Find functionality is available on most applications and has been designed to allow users to scan all of the information on any given page (or group of pages, in the case of entire Word documents, for example) for specific words or phrases.

You can easily use an application’s Find feature to search for specific words on a page within the application. To use an application’s Find feature (provided that the application has the Find functionality built into it in the first place), all you need to do is:

1. Press Ctrl + F if you’re using the Windows Operating System (regardless of what version of Windows you’re using). Or, press Command + F if you’re using a Mac computer. Doing so will trigger the Find feature of whatever application you’re in, and a search field should appear on your screen. 
2. Type the word, words or phrase you want to search the page you’re on for into the search field that shows up.
   Note: Most applications will immediately initiate a search for your query, but some might need you to tell them to initiate the search by clicking on OK or Find or whatever applies. 
3. Every single instance of the word or group of words you searched for throughout the entirety of the page will be highlighted, and you can cycle through the results by clicking on the Next and Previous buttons (which might be labeled a bit differently depending on what application you’re using) in the Find box to locate the instance of the query that you were looking for in the first place.

A keyboard shortcut isn’t the only way to access an application’s Find functionality – you can also manually locate the feature in the application’s menu(s) and trigger it from there. For example, Internet Explorer has its Find feature hidden away in the Edit menu, you can get the Find bar to appear in Google Chrome by simply clicking on the Options button (represented by three vertically aligned dots) and clicking on Find…, and Microsoft Word’s Find functionality can be triggered from the Editing section of the Home tab of its toolbar.