IPhone – stop mobile Safari from opening the bookmarks whenever I start the app

You could save a bookmark to about:blank (or your desired home page) as an icon in your home screen. Then click that to launch Safari rather than the Safari icon.

To do this:

• open Safari.
• Type the url about:blank into the URL area and go to that page. The page will, unsurprisingly, be empty.
• Press the share button, and select "Add to Home Screen"
• Assign a name to this blank page. In your case, you might want to call it Safari.

(Dan Frakes of MacWorld spells out these steps at http://www.macworld.com/article/159303/2011/04/ios_safari_blank_page.html; thanks to Heng-Cheong Leong for point this out).

Alternately, you could close any pages you had open in Safari before exiting the program.

There is no interface for searching within Mobile Safari.

There is no secondary viewing options other than tapping and pawing through the history UI that mobile safari draws when you tap the book icon to the right of the navigation arrows at the top of the screen.

In the absence of a native solution, you can get at the history and bookmarks once you connect an iOS device to a computer.

On Mac OS, you can use a tool like PhoneView to archive all data from an iOS device, and this archive includes mobile Safari's web history and bookmarks so you can make fast work of searching the 8 days of device history once you have the data on your Mac.