Apple designed its Support pages to make it easy for you to find product information, how-to articles, manuals, technical support, software downloads, and more. While we provide quick access to the site's main sections through the navigation bar and product pop-up menus, you can find articles and information faster with the Search tool (you'll find a Search box on most Apple Support webpages).

To get better search results, here are some ways to search smarter:



Understand how the Search tool works

To start a search, type a few keywords that address your product of interest and a topic or issue into the Search field. Then click the Search button (the magnifying glass) or press Return to get the results. Our search engine uses the words you type to return results based on how you entered the text.

If you type a simple keyword in the field, such as iPod, you may be faced with hundreds or thousands of search results. To narrow your results, type two or more words, such as iPod nano—or better yet, be even more specific by typing iPod nano sync—and the Search tool will return documents that contain all the words you specified. If you're on a product's support page, you can select the Restrict checkbox to see only results for that product.

In the Search Results page, you'll see several tabs that separate all of the different categories of content that our search engine finds for your search query. The categories are All Results (all relevant content mixed together), Technical Articles (the relevant learning, support, and troubleshooting articles from our Knowledge Base), Downloads (all relevant software downloads), Manuals (all relevant product manuals), and Help (the relevant Mac Help content). Just select the tab that corresponds to what you want (the default view is Technical Articles).


Choose a good search string

The words you type in the Search field are known collectively as a “search string.” As a general rule, don't type just one word. You'll probably get tons of results that may have nothing to do with your question or issue at hand. Type at least two or three keywords that name a product and an issue or topic. Don't type too many or you may see few results; if this is the case, remove a word or two from your search string and try again.

The search engine also looks at the order in which you type your words. The first word gets priority, while everything that follows takes less precedence incrementally. While the search engine will generally return about the same number of documents, the order of your Search Results rankings may differ, depending on your wording.

Do be specific. Try not to use broad keywords. If you type printing, you'll get a lot of results that may or may not match the answers that you seek. Instead, choose particular words. For example, depending on what “printing” information you're looking for, you can better focus the search with these search strings:

Mac OS X epson
Mac OS X can't print
Mac OS X printer sharing

Avoid typing complete sentences as your search string; they generally won't yield many (or any) results. For example, if you type How come Mail keeps asking for my password, our Search tool will look for documents that contain every one of these words (and won't find any). Instead, focus on keywords by simply typing Mail asks password. The text may sound pretty Cro-Magnon, but you'll have much better success.

Be careful when using numbers in your searches. For example, if you type Mac OS X 10.4.5 file sharing as your search string, the results may exclude documents that make reference to other versions of Mac OS X 10.4 that still apply to Mac OS X 10.4.5. You'll have better success if you type Mac OS X 10.4 file sharing. However, do add version numbers when words alone (such as Mac OS X) give you too many search results, or if you have questions about a specific version of Mac OS.


Use quotation marks (or parenthesis) to streamline results

Instead of sorting through documents that feature random instances of all your search string words, you can make the search engine return only the documents that match a specific phrase. How? Simply wrap a search string phrase in quotation marks (or if you prefer, you can use parenthesis instead). The Search tool will only return results that include that exact phrase in your specified order. This works well if you want to target a specific phrase (such as a phrase in an error message), or a particular product that has multiple models. You can still add other keywords outside of your quoted phrase for further focus. For example:

"firmware needs to be updated"
iMac (Flat Panel)
iTunes "how to install"

Work around letter case, stemming, and wild cards

First of all, don't worry about capitalizing proper names, such as iPod or PowerBook. Our search engine will look at powerbook and PowerBook the same way. Do be aware that spaces do count, so power book is not the same as powerbook.

Word variations, known as stemming in search parlance, are another matter. Stemming enables a search engine to return results from variations of a keyword (for example, “install” will also return results for “installed,” “installing,” and “installs” with stemming-supported engines). Our search engine does not stem, but you can get results for word variants by using the OR operator in between the word variants (note that OR must be capitalized). This enables you to get more results with your effort.

For example, the following search strings will pull up more results because the search engine will return all articles that include any of the word variants:

Mac OS X installing OR install OR installed
iTunes share OR shared OR sharing

Likewise, our search engine does not have a wild card feature. That is, you can't type a special character (such as an asterisk) after the root of a word to have the search engine return documents that match all possible endings to that root word.


Use quotes when searching for error codes

Sometimes an application may display an error code that prompts you to search for information about the code on our site. You can search for the specific error by entering the error code in the Search field. However, because some error codes are given as hyphenated numbers (for example, Error code -1000), you need to wrap the actual error code in quotation marks or the search engine will exclude any results that contain that error code (see "Narrow results by excluding words," below).

For example, if you want to find information about Error code -1425, type error "-1425" in the Search box to get results. Don't wrap the quotation marks around the entire search string or you might severely limit your search results—in other words, typing "error -1425" will give you less results than typing error "-1425".


Narrow results by excluding words

You can exclude results that contain certain words by simply putting a hyphen (-) immediately in front of the word that you want to exclude. Make sure that you include a space before the hyphen but not after it (don't type a space between the hyphen and the word you want to exclude).

For example, if you're a Mac user who's trying to find out how to share music in iTunes, you could type iTunes "share music" -windows. This tells the search engine that you want information on iTunes, you want all documents to include the phrase “share music,” and you want to exclude all documents that are geared toward Windows users by telling the engine not to return documents that contain the word “windows.”


Use Knowledge Base keywords

Another way to get precise results is to use our own Knowledge Base keywords in your search string. We use these special keywords to identify all articles in the Knowledge Base. For example, we tag iPod shuffle documents with the keyword “kshuffle,” iMac documents are tagged with “kimac,” and Safari documents have the “ksafari” tag.

You can learn how to use Knowledge Base keywords to help improve your search results. Keep in mind that Knowledge Base keywords should be a secondary option to use if your first search attempt doesn't find what you want (or finds too much).


Refine results with Advanced Search

If you want the highest degree of control over your search results, Advanced Search is for you. You can access Advanced Search by either clicking the Advanced Search link in any Search box or clicking Advanced Search in the navigation bar.

The Advanced Search tool gives you a few options that allow you to dictate how you want the search engine to function. You can control how the engine uses words in the search string—you can have it search for all words, an exact phrase, match at least one of the words, and exclude certain words. Each of these fields functions similarly to what we showed you earlier. For example, the “exact phrase” field serves the same function as if you'd typed quotation marks around a phrase, while the “without the words” field functions like the word exclusion method.

You can also tell the engine to return only documents written in a specific language, such as English, Japanese, French, or German. This can be especially helpful if you live in a country where, say, French is not the native language, but is the language you understand. While we localize many of our popular articles, you'll find more results if you search for English language articles only.

You can also select a specific Apple product from the Product pop-up menu to limit your search results, select a category (such as Technical Articles, Frequently Asked Questions, Downloads, Manuals, and more) to dictate the type of content you want, and even tell the search engine to include content that was created prior to 1997.