How to Search Better:
Use browser tabs for comparing pages

How to Search Better

What are you looking for?

Taking control

Google Tricks

Natural language searching

Bookmarks

Sherlock

Browser tabs

Google Calculator

Whichever web browser you use, make sure its tabs feature is turned on. (Internet Explorer doesn’t do tabs, but you really shouldn’t be using it any more - the Mac version is ancient, and the Windows version is inherently insecure.) In Safari’s preferences, click Tabs and then click the Enable Tabbed Browsing checkbox.

Mac-specific shortcuts ahead!
With tabs enabled, just command-click a link in your page of search results to open the link in a new tab, and use command-shift-left or right arrow key to step between tabs without grabbing the mouse. Now you can open multiple search result links at once in one window and step between them to compare their relative merits. Command-w closes the current tab, as does clicking the tab close button (not the standard window close button), and command-option-w closes all tabs in the current window apart from the one you’re viewing.

Everyone who uses search engines should be working with tabs in their browser as a matter of course; it makes checking results much faster and more manageable.

Looking for web site optimisation tips instead? Read the Be Found pages.

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