safarisearch
Suppose I am trying to search for information about this file:
/etc/inetd.conf
If I paste the following into Safari's search bar:
"/etc/inetd.conf"
Safari tries to be clever and converts it into :
http://www.".com/etc/inetd.conf%22
And then tells me it can't be found. If I do the same with Chrome, it simply searches for what I want without trying to be clever.
How can I prevent Safari from trying to do "smart searching" and instead simply search for what I want?
Like suggested elsewhere, you can drag the search text from the URL bar into some plain text view. However, one can also directly drag it into a (rich text) email or chat message. Or into Google's search field which is conveniently close to Safari's location bar:
(In previous versions, you could drag the magnifying glass icon; in 2016 versions just drag the search text like shown above.)
After dragging into Google's search field, the additional search text is already selected and focussed, ready for Command+C:
(In earlier versions, Safari's location bar will still have focus, and the URL in Google's search input will be gray, not blue. In those versions one could first hit Tab after searching to go into Google's search field, hit Delete to clear it, and then drag the icon. After that, the search field is ready for Command+C as well.)
The Share button to the right of the location bar can also share the URL, but probably only when messaging has been configured:
As an aside: the Google URLs include a lot of irrelevant things, specific to your browser, language, etc. Often, it's enough to use www.google.com#q=elvis+is+alive, or for image search www.google.com#tbm=isch&q=elvis+is+alive, but then one needs to change the spaces into plus-characters to ensure it's clickable. (And one also needs to percent-encode other special characters.) It would be nice if Google would provide some bare sharing link on its own site.
Using the built in 'Search With Google' service for Safari you can assign it a shortcut key combo.
I had to make sure that the normal service did not have a shortcut. Giving it one here does not work on my 10.10.2 os x
Now add a new Application shortcut for Safari: Using Search With Google as the Menu title.
You then may have to relaunch Safari for it to pick it up and you can use it.
But now all you need to do is select some text in Safari and use the shortcut.
Best Answer
open the search engine page (e.g.:google.com) and paste the string into the search field.
paste the above into the URL bar (which is increasingly abused as a search field as well.)
To indicate that you are cleverer than Safari, jump to the first position and insert a space character. (e.g. Ctrl+a, followed by Space)
That indicates to the browser that you are searching for a string and not trying to insert a botched URL. The leading space will be ignored by your search engine. This works in almost all cases when you want to make sure that Safari parses the contents of the URL bar not as an address but as a search string.
Now some strings seem to be more equal than others. Input
"/etc/inetd.conf"and indeed Safari also ignores the first space for that. Then there are other examples like:/private/etcsearches directly,/privatesearches directly,/private/opens a Finder window… Some paths seem to be hardcoded.In the example above
/ etc/inetd.confshould take you to a desired result.