Google is big. Google Search generated $225 billion in revenue in 2022, thanks in part to being the default search engine on all Apple devices. To retain that position—and continue to reap the ad revenue that it generates—Google pays Apple about $18 billion every year. Along with Apple, Google pays billions to phone manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and Motorola; major wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers like Mozilla and Opera.

So is Google Search’s 90% market share because it’s the best search engine or because Google has enough money to pay distributors for top placement?

Along with concerns about whether Google is the best search engine, some people worry about Google collecting information about them to show targeted ads alongside search results. The more information Google has on users, the argument goes, the better that ads can be targeted, and the more likely it is that users will click the ads, which generates money for Google from advertisers. Others worry that Google’s results may reflect certain types of bias.

If you’re perturbed by the privacy implications of Google knowing everything you search for, or if you’ve found Google’s search results less helpful than you’d like, you can easily switch to another search engine to see if you prefer its results and privacy stance.

How to Switch Search Engines

For many Apple users, the main place to choose a preferred search engine is in Safari’s settings. On the Mac, choose Safari > Settings > Search and choose the desired search engine from the Search Engine pop-up menu. You can choose a different one for Private Browsing windows if you want.

In Chrome-based browsers like Google Chrome, Arc, Brave, Microsoft Edge, and Opera on the Mac, open the settings and look for Search Engine. A pop-up menu lets you choose from some standard options, and additional choices let you add search engines like Brave Search that are too new (or not paying) to appear. Firefox offers similar options when you choose Firefox > Settings > Search.

On the iPhone and iPad, go to Settings > Safari >  Search Engine. Again, if you want a different search engine in Private Browsing tabs, turn off Also Use in Private Browsing and choose another option.

Top Alternative Search Engines

Conceptually, what search engines do is simple—they search a set of Web pages for matching keywords and return a list of them in order of relevance to the user. The hard part is dealing with the number of pages—estimates suggest Google indexes 50 billion pages and Bing 4.5 billion—and scaling the service to respond instantly to tens or hundreds of millions of queries per day. (Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day; Bing handles 400 million.) Beyond Google, here are the main search engines and what sets them apart. (You will also likely see Yandex, sometimes called “the Google of Russia.” Avoid it. For so many reasons.)

• Bing: The second-most popular (though far, far behind Google) search engine in the world, Microsoft’s Bing sets itself apart with a busy, highly designed search results page that mixes a variety of results. It may work well for you, or you may find it overwhelming and difficult to parse. Microsoft is also putting a lot of effort into chat-based AI-powered results. Bing claims to offer more user privacy than Google, but it’s still tracking users to target ads better. If Bing has better privacy than Google, it may mostly be due to not being part of the larger Google data-collection empire.
  
• Yahoo: Though it was the first Web search engine, Yahoo hasn’t run its own index since 2009. Today, Yahoo’s search results are powered by Microsoft Bing, so while the look of the search results page may differ, the results should be identical to Bing’s. Yahoo’s privacy stance is also similar to Bing’s.
  
• DuckDuckGo: If privacy is paramount, DuckDuckGo is worth a look because it does not track or store user information at all. Instead, it chooses ads to display only by matching with search keywords. Although it uses Bing for some of its results, DuckDuckGo also incorporates information from numerous other sources, so it won’t seem like an exact clone of Bing.
  
• Ecosia: The main reason to use the Berlin-based Ecosia is if you like Bing’s results (but not its layout) and want to support a “social business” that claims to be carbon-negative, offers full financial transparency, and protects users’ privacy. Founded in 2009, Ecosia today relies entirely on Bing’s search results and ads (clicks on which are how Ecosia earns money), and it claims to have planted over 188 million trees in 35 countries since its inception. It’s hard to argue with Ecosia’s environmental results, but as a search engine, it doesn’t feel special.
  
• Brave Search: A truly independent search engine, Brave Search relies on its own created-from-scratch index (it leaned on Google and Bing for some results early on, but ceased in August 2023). It also emphasizes user privacy and doesn’t track users, searches, or clicks. Although Brave Search displays keyword-based ads by default, users can pay $3 per month for Brave Search Premium, which provides ad-free results pages. You’ll have to set Brave as the default search engine for most browsers manually; for Safari, all you can do is make a favorite to search.brave.com.
  
• Kagi: Speaking of paid search engines, if you really want to avoid ads, Kagi is another independent search engine that rolls its own index and provides access only to subscribers, eschewing ads entirely. You can sign up for a 100-search test account, and if you like it, pay $5 per month for 300 searches or $10 per month for unlimited searches. As with Brave Search, you must manually set Kagi as the default search engine (there’s an extension for Safari).
  

The “best” search engine is the one that gives you the answers you want without triggering privacy worries or concerns about bias. If you want to see if something other than Google will work better for you, set it as your default search engine and try it for a few weeks.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Prykhodov)

You’ve ended up with two folders whose contents—hundreds of files or more—are similar but not identical. Perhaps you’re recovering from a sync failure, or maybe you pulled an old version of the folder from a backup and aren’t sure what’s different. Regardless, here’s how you can merge them in the Finder. Make sure the folders are named identically and are in two different locations on your Mac. Press and hold the Option key, then drag the folder that contains more files to the location that contains the folder with fewer files. In the dialog that appears, click Merge to copy only newer files from the source and those not already in the destination. (It’s not a two-way sync; for that, you need an app like ChronoSync.) The Merge button appears only if the source folder contains files not in the destination; if the folders contain just different versions of identically named files, you’ll get only Stop and Replace buttons. For safety, always work on copies of your folders and check your work afterward to ensure the right things happened.

(Featured image by iStock.com/RerF)

Many people use screenshots to clip portions of their Mac screen for later reference. For example, you could save a screenshot of an error dialog to show tech support, store a confirmation number from a Web page, or keep a chat from social media. You can even record screen movies to show a developer how their app is misbehaving.

Years ago, Apple introduced a floating control bar that makes accessing features for taking screenshots and recording screen movies easier. The hardest thing about using the control bar is memorizing its keyboard shortcut: Command-Shift-5. (The even older shortcuts of Command-Shift-3 for full-screen screenshots and Command-Shift-4 for windows and portions of the screen also still work.)

Meet the Control Bar

Let’s take a quick tour of the control bar. The leftmost  🅧 button dismisses the bar (alternatively, press Esc). You can also drag next to the 🅧 to reposition the bar. You’ll use the following three buttons to take screenshots and the next two to record movies.

The Options button displays a pop-up menu. If you’ve selected a screenshot button, the menu offers screenshot-related choices; if you’ve clicked either movie button, you see recording choices.

You may also see a Capture or Record button off to the right; more on them shortly.

Using the Options Menu

The top area of this menu, labeled Save To, enables you to choose a destination for screenshots or movies. By default, it’s set to the Desktop folder, which makes it easy to work with your screenshots right away, but your desktop can quickly get cluttered if you take a lot of screenshots. Feel free to choose Other Location and specify a folder of your choice, such as the Screenshots folder shown above.

If you choose an app like Mail, Messages, or Preview, a copy of your screenshot or movie will immediately appear in that app. For screenshots, you can also choose Clipboard to put a copy in the clipboard so you can paste it. Holding down the Control key while capturing a screenshot also puts the screenshot in the clipboard.

The Timer options let you adjust something on the screen immediately before your screenshot or movie begins. You can choose a 5- or 10-second delay. Timers are handy for situations where invoking the control bar would change the screen in an undesirable way.

With movies, you can record your voice over the action on screen. Select the desired microphone in the menu.

The bottom portion of the menu offers special options:

• With Show Floating Thumbnail, a small icon of a screenshot or movie appears temporarily in the lower-right corner of the screen after you take it. In the case of a screenshot, you can click this icon to mark it up, trash it, or share it; for a movie, you can crop it (useful if the start or end aren’t what you want), play it, delete it, or share it.
• Remember Last Selection is a big help when generating a batch of screenshots or movies using the same selection rectangle.
• To make your pointer appear in your screenshot, choose Show Mouse Pointer, and for movies, to display a circle where you click, choose Show Mouse Clicks.

Taking a Screenshot

Here’s how to take each type of screenshot:

• Capture Entire Screen: Click the leftmost screenshot button and move the pointer off the control bar. Click the screen. (If your Mac has multiple screens, click the one you want.)
• Capture Selected Window: To limit your screenshot to just one standalone interface element—a window, dialog, or menu—click the second button and then click the desired item. If you want to capture a dialog separately from an app window behind it, press Command and move the pointer over the dialog. (To eliminate the drop shadow, press and hold Option as you click.)
• Capture Selected Portion: To take a screenshot of an arbitrary portion of the screen, use the third screenshot button . Click it and then resize and reposition the selection rectangle over the desired area—note that it shows you the pixel dimensions of the selection. (Reposition the rectangle by moving it with the hand pointer that appears when you hover over it, and resize it by dragging any selection dot.) Finally, click the Capture button at the right of the control bar or press the Return key to create the screenshot.

The name of the resulting image will be “Screenshot” plus the current date and time. It will also be in PNG format. If you prefer JPEG format for all your screenshots, you can change the default by pasting the command below into Terminal. Change things back by repeating the command, replacing JPG with PNG.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG

Recording a Movie

The two screen recording buttons are also easy to use:

• Record Entire Screen: Click the first movie button and then the Record button at the right of the control bar. If you have two or more screens, clicking the Record button presents a menu from which you can choose which screen to record.
• Record Selected Portion: Click the second movie button , then resize and reposition the selection rectangle over the recording area, just as with capturing a selection for a screenshot. When you’re ready, click the Record button.

When it’s time to stop recording, if you see a stop button on the menu bar to the right of the current app’s menu items, click it. If it’s hard to find, press Command-Shift-5 to bring up the control bar again, which will now offer a stop button. Or just press Command-Control-Escape.

Movies are named “Screen Recording” plus the date and time and will be in QuickTime movie (.mov) format using the H.264 codec.

With screenshots and screen movies, the sky’s the limit for what you can capture or record, whether it’s a funny autocorrect chat mistake, an important reservation number, or a movie of a buggy app to share with tech support.

(Featured image uses a background by iStock.com/Altinosmanaj)

iOS 17 brings a new mode for the iPhone: StandBy. All you have to do is connect your iPhone to a charger wirelessly or with a cable, position it on its side in landscape orientation, and press the side button to lock the screen. Standby works best with a MagSafe charging stand. Swipe left or right to switch between three screens: widgets, photos, and clocks. Swipe up and down to move between widgets, photo collections, and clock styles. On the widget screen, touch and hold to add and remove widgets, and on the photo screen, to choose which collections and albums to display. You can choose how long the display stays active in Settings > StandBy > Display. By default, it will stay on all the time on iPhone models with an Always-On display; a tap or nudge will wake it on other iPhone models. Finally, StandBy remembers your preferred view in different locations, so it can be a clock in the bedroom, a photo frame in the kitchen, and a clock at the office.

(Featured image by Apple)

The concept of site-specific browsers has been around for a long time, but in the version of Safari that comes with macOS 14 Sonoma, Apple brought it to the big time by making setup easier than ever.

Put simply, a site-specific browser is a Mac app that encapsulates a single Web app or site. The goal is to break a website out of a Web browser and turn it into what looks and works like a regular Mac app. Gmail the Web app can become Gmail the Mac app.

What kind of websites might you want to turn into a standalone app? Beyond Gmail, consider Google Docs, Netflix, Notion, QuickBooks, and any other Web-focused app that feels more natural as a standalone app. Additionally, a site-specific browser can be helpful for any website you use regularly throughout the day, such as a discussion site, news aggregator, or company intranet.

To create a Web app in Safari, open the desired page, choose File > Add to Dock, and give the app your desired name.

That’s it! Safari saves the Web app to the Applications folder in your Home folder (not the regular top-level Applications folder), adds it to the next open spot on the Dock and in Launchpad, and enables you to open it using Spotlight. The tab you had open in Safari remains open, so close that and launch the new Web app from the Dock.

Web apps look and feel just like Web pages in Safari, with a few exceptions:

• If you click a link to another page on the same website as the Web app, the page opens within the window, but clicking a link to another website opens it in Safari as a new tab. There are a few special cases, too—double-clicking a document in a Google Drive Web app opens it in a new window within the Web app rather than in Safari.
• Web apps have their own browsing history, cookies, website data, and settings, which aren’t shared with Safari.
• Web app toolbars have only back and forward buttons and a Share button. They lack an address bar, bookmarks, tabs, and extensions, but you can switch back to Safari to get those—choose File > Open in Safari.
• For websites that have notifications, the Web app’s icon in the Dock can show the number of unread notifications.

To tweak the name or appearance of the Web app, click the app’s name in the menu bar and choose Settings. The only option that isn’t obvious is the icon—if it’s too fuzzy or not what you prefer, click it and select a file in the dialog that appears. You can select either an image file or another app. (Hint: To find more icons, search for “AppName icon” in Google or Bing.)

Keep these tips about Web apps in mind:

• You can remove a Web app from the Dock without deleting it from your drive.
• To delete a Web app, drag its icon from your Home folder’s Applications folder to the trash.
• To make the Web app launch at login, add it to your login items in System Settings > General > Login Items.
• Web apps cannot receive incoming URLs on their own. In other words, if you have a Google Docs Web app and click a Google Docs link that someone sends you in email, it will open in your default Web browser, not your Google Docs Web app. However, you can use the $10 utility Choosy to redirect appropriate links to specific Web apps.

Overall, Apple has done a good job with Safari Web apps. They’re easy to create and provide most of what you’ll likely want in an app that encapsulates a website. Give them a try, but if you find yourself needing capabilities beyond what Safari provides, such as access to extensions, support for tabs, more control over how links open, and choices of different browser engines, check out alternative site-specific browser apps like Unite, Coherence X, and WebCatalog.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Armastas)

If you are accustomed to opening the Camera app on your iPhone by tapping its Home Screen app icon or Lock Screen widget icon, you may find it challenging to remember to use the new Camera Control button on the side of an iPhone 16. That button is a big win for easy access to the camera and its settings. To help retrain your camera habits, hide the Camera app icon on a secondary Home Screen or in a folder and remove it from the Lock Screen. To conceal it from your Home Screen, touch and hold it to enter jiggle mode, then drag it to another screen or into a folder. To remove it from the Lock Screen, touch and hold the Lock Screen, tap Customize, tap the Lock Screen, and then tap the minus button on the Camera widget. Replace it with another widget you’ll find useful.

(Featured image by iStock.com/valiantsin suprunovich)

Since its inception, Time Machine has backed up on an hourly schedule. It then keeps hourly backups for the previous 24 hours, daily backups for the last month, and weekly backups back to the start of the backup. Once free space on the backup drive gets low, Time Machine deletes older backups to make room for new ones, always maintaining at least one copy of every backed-up file. The traditional hourly backups are usually fine, but starting in macOS 13 Ventura, Apple lets you choose a daily or weekly schedule instead. One of those might be useful for Macs that are turned on infrequently or where very little important data changes. It also might reduce resource usage and how much data Time Machine backs up. Most people shouldn’t need to change the backup frequency, but if you’ve always wanted to, now you can.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/STILLFX)

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2024! For many of us, starting a new year means reflecting on fresh habits we’d like to adopt. Although we support any resolutions you may have made to get enough sleep, eat better, exercise more, and reduce social media usage, allow us suggest a few more that will improve your digital security and reduce the chances that bad things will happen to you online.

Back Up All Your Devices

The most important thing you can do to stave off the slings and arrows of digital doom is to make regular backups. Bad things happen to good people, such as a Mac’s SSD failing, an iPhone accidentally falling off a boat, an Apple Watch breaking in a fall, or loss due to theft, fire, or flood. With a good backup strategy, you can recover from nearly any problem.

For the Mac, it’s easiest to back up with Time Machine to an external drive, but remember that an offsite or Internet backup is also essential. With iPhones and iPads, it’s easiest to back up to iCloud, which happens every night automatically if you turn it on in Settings > Your Name > iCloud > iCloud Backup, but you can also back up to your Mac if you don’t have sufficient iCloud storage space. Apple Watches automatically back up to their paired iPhones, so if you protect your iPhone, you can always restore your Apple Watch.

Keep Your Devices Updated

Another key thing you can do to protect your security is to install new operating system updates and security updates soon after Apple releases them. Although the details seldom make the news because they’re both highly specific and highly technical, you can get a sense of how important security updates are by the fact that a typical update addresses 10–30 vulnerabilities that Apple or outside researchers have identified. Some are even zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in the wild.

It’s usually a good idea to wait a week or so after an update appears before installing, on the off-chance that it has undesirable side effects. Although such problems are uncommon, when they do happen, Apple pulls the update quickly, fixes it, and releases it again, usually within a few days.

Use a Password Manager

We’ll keep banging the password manager drum until passkeys, the replacement for passwords, have become ubiquitous, which will take years. Until then, if you’re still typing passwords in by hand or copying and pasting from a list you keep in a file, please start using a password manager like Apple’s built-in password manager. A password manager offers five huge benefits:

• It generates strong passwords for you. Mypassword1 can be hacked in seconds.
• It stores your passwords securely. An Excel file on your desktop is a recipe for disaster.
• It enters passwords for you. Wouldn’t that be easier than typing them in manually?
• It audits existing accounts. How many of your accounts use the same weak password?
• It lets you access passwords on all your devices. Finally, easy logins on your iPhone!

A bonus benefit for families is password sharing. It allows couples to share essential passwords or parents and teens to share specific passwords.

Using a password manager is faster, easier, more secure, and better. If you need help getting started, get in touch.

Beware of Phishing Email

Individuals and businesses frequently suffer from security lapses caused by phishing, forged emails that fool someone into revealing login credentials, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information. Although spam filters catch many phishing attempts, you must always be on guard. Here’s what to watch for:

• Any email that tries to get you to reveal information, follow a link, or sign a document
• Messages from people you don’t know, asking you to take an unusual action
• Direct email from a large company for whom you’re an anonymous customer
• Forged email from a trusted source asking for sensitive information
• All messages that contain numerous spelling and grammar mistakes

When in doubt, don’t follow the link or reply to the email. Instead, contact the sender another way to see if the message is legit.

Never Respond to Unsolicited Calls or Texts

Although phishing happens mostly via email, scammers also use texts and phone calls. Thanks to weaknesses in the telephone system, such texts and calls can appear to come from well-known companies, including Apple and Amazon. Even worse, with so much online ordering, fake text messages pretending to help you track packages are becoming more common.

For texts, avoid following links unless you recognize the sender and it makes sense that you’d be receiving such a link. (For instance, Apple can text delivery details related to your orders.) Regardless, never enter login information at a site you’ve reached by following a link because there’s no way to know if it’s real. Instead, if you want to learn more, manually navigate to the company’s site by entering its URL, then log in.

For phone calls from companies, unless you’re expecting a call back from a support ticket you opened, don’t answer. Let the call go to voicemail, and if you feel it’s important to respond, look up the company’s phone number elsewhere and talk with someone at that number rather than the one provided by the voicemail.

Avoid Sketchy Websites

We won’t belabor this last one, but suffice it to say that you’re much more likely to pick up malware from sites on the fringes of the Web or that cater to the vices of society. The more you can avoid sites that revolve around pirated software, cryptocurrency, “adult” content, gambling, or sales of illicit substances, the safer you’ll be. That’s not to say that reputable sites haven’t been hacked and used to distribute malware, but it’s far less common.

If you are concerned after spending time in the darker corners of the Web, download a free copy of Malwarebytes and scan for malware manually.

Let’s raise a glass to staying safe online in 2024!

(Featured image by iStock.com/Bet_Noire)

Sometimes, something goes wrong, causing Mail on the Mac to have trouble sending a message. When it does, you may see an error like the one below, encouraging you with a default button to try another configured server. Don’t do it! Always click Try Later. If that still doesn’t work, contact your favorite tech support professional to troubleshoot the problem with the SMTP server associated with the account from which you’re sending. Attempting to send through another SMTP server is a recipe for trouble because various anti-spam checks may fail, causing your message to be filtered as spam or bounced back to you. Worse, if you select a different server and click Try With Selected Server, Mail remembers that choice going forward, so you will have to reset it manually later.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Marut Khobtakhob)

Have you ever wanted to extract an object from a photo for use in another context? Starting with iOS 16 on a relatively recent iPhone, you can do that with many photos. In the Photos app, touch and hold the object, and if Photos can extract it, you’ll see a highlight run around its edges. Raise your finger, and a popover lets you copy the object, look up information about it, turn it into a sticker (in iOS 17), or share it. Or you can start dragging the object, switch apps with your other hand, and drop it into another app, like Messages. With Universal Clipboard, you can even lift an object on an iPhone, copy it, switch to Preview on your Mac, and choose File > New from Clipboard. File this one under Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, which states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

(Featured image by Adam Engst)