I’m always looking for faster and easier ways to do things.
One of those things is searching the web for a person or term I come across but I’m not familiar with on iOS.
If you want to look something up without using Siri[footnote]That is, not telling Siri, “Search the web for …”[/footnote] , which, is handy but in general quite shameful in public place, you have a couple of options.
Let’s say you’re reading an article in an app that isn’t Safari–Reeder, Pocket, Instapaper, any news app–and you want to look up a person the article mentions. There are three options. And one that you’re probably not using takes the cake for fastest, but it’s a bit hidden.
Option 1 – The Classic
- Tap and highlight the word(s) you want to search for
- Tap Copy
- Press the home button to go to the home screen
- Find Safari
- Open Safari
- Tap on the address bar
- Delete the current content in the bar
- Tap and hold or double tap
- Tap Paste
- Tap Go
That’s not hard, likely because you’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s just 10 crazy steps for a simple search. We can do better. We must do better.
Option 2 – The Enlightened
- Tap and highlight the word(s) you want to search for
- Tap Copy
- Press the home button to go to the home screen
- Pull down
- Click and hold or double tap
- Tap Paste
- Tap Search Web
30% fewer taps, but there’s one more option that beats the socks off of both of these options, but it’s tucked away in the far corners of iOS.
Option 3 – The Hacker
- Click and highlight the word(s) you want to search for
- Tap Define
- In the bottom right corner tap Search the Web
That’s it! Crazy, right? It’s not even close in terms of how much better this is than the other two, more commonly used, options.
I just came across this tip fairly recently, so I’m still getting used to using it, but it’s so much faster than the other two options it’s hard to believe they all accomplish the same task.