"Safari History Items" in Spotlight

"Safari History Items" show up in my Spotlight searches. This despite the fact that I have "Webpages" unchecked in Spotlight preferences. So, maybe Safari History Items and webpages are two different things? So what does "Webpages" refer to? Mac Help does not contain descriptions of what the categories in Preferences refer to. Also, if turning off Webpages in Spotlight prefs does not remove Safari History Items from Spotlight searches, what does? I like to turn off items in Spotlight that I can just as easily access from other programs, like mail messages in Mail, events in iCal, etc.

PITA isn't it! AFAIK, they're webhistory, but can't be deleted from a search. If you want to report this issue to Apple's engineering, send a bug report or an enhancement request via its Bug Reporter system. To do this, join the Mac Developer Program—it's free and available for all Mac users and gets you a look at some development software. Since you already have an Apple username/ID, use that. Once a member, go to Apple BugReporter and file your bug report or enhancement request. The nice thing with this procedure is that you get a response and a follow-up number; thus, starting a dialog with engineering.
Alternatively, you could delete the files in /Users/"username"/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/ every so often and they won't show up.

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How did old Safari History Items I haven't visited in years appear recently?

I upgraded to Mountain Lion on Saturday October 13th. I then ran software updates, and got everything up to date. I was home alone, and the only thing I went to YouTube for was to get guidance for setting up Facebook and Twitter notifications. That's it. Today, using spotlight, some Safari History Items appeared for October 13th, 2012 for sites I haven't visited in years. However, none of them show up in my Safari Histroy. What gives?
Please help! I'm being accused of looking at inappropriate material when I didn't.
I'm at a loss to explain what really happened. Any concrete help will be greatly appreciated

Triple-click the line below to select it:
~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select Services ▹ Open from the contextual menu. Delete the contents of the folder that opens. Quit and relaunch Safari.

How to setup spotlight to ignore safari history item. I just want bookmarks

Anybody know how to setup Spotlight so that when I do a search, it just finds bookmarks? I don't want all of the history items.
Thanks to all who answer.
Mark

You can check if you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize some prefs each time you start Firefox.
The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created it, so normally it wouldn't be there.<br />
You can check its content with a plain text editor if the file is there and you didn't create this file yourself.
The user.js file is read each time you start Firefox and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.
*http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved
You can do a search for delta search pref on the <b>about:config</b> page and reset related user set (bold) prefs via the right-click context menu to the default value.

Deleting Safari History Items with Restrictions Set

Hi All,
My daughter's iPad mini has restrictions set to 'limit adult content'. One of the apparent benefits of this was the the 'Clear' button on Safari history and 'Private Browsing Mode' were disabled. I was then able to periodically audit the history to check nothing untoward. I could also temporarily remove restrictions to clear the history before re-enabling them.
However, I have just noticed that if you swipe left on an item in history, you are given the option to delete - without removing Restrictions first.
Is this expected behaviour or has a particular update caused this? Is there a setting to prevent history deletion?
Many Thanks,

You can clear just history on iOS 8, but there's no analogous easy way to do it in Yosemite.
For Yosemite, to clear history manually, you must:
Go to Safari's History -> Show History
Click in the History window and Select All (Command-A or Edit -> Select All)
Press "Delete"
Note that due to cacheing and the fact that History may now be synced across devices via iCloud, you may need to repeat steps 2 and 3 multiple times before you delete all History items.
For iOS 8, display History, tap "Clear" and choose the option you prefer.

Duplicate Safari History Items

Hi,
When somebody visits a page in Safari today, does it delete any duplicate items from before? I.e. if I visited exactly the same page yesterday morning, would Safari still show the history item in yesterday's history, or will it no longer be there being as there is a fresher instance/visit?
Thanks very much!

Thanks for the quick response. Just to clarify what I meant, here is why I am asking....
I have been having an issue with my daughter viewing a particular page in Facebook. I saw it in the history on Sunday, then I visited it on Monday. When I revisited the Sunday history, the entry was gone. Is that possible if the page was exactly the same?! I asked my daughter if she had deleted that line of history, but she assures me that she doesn't know how to delete individual lines of history.
Sorry, I know there is a whole separate issue here and people will no doubt have their 2 cents on parenting and trust, etc, but if my daughter knows how to delete part of the history I need to implement something else to prevent her from seeing content that I am not comfortable with.
Thanks again.

How to remove safari history items

i would like to know if there is a way to remove safari cokies safely.
Thank you!

That's two different things, but in both cases you can slect that from the Safari Menu/Reset Safari.

Opening safari history gives prompt that says I am opening an application.

I think this happened after 10.5.2. When I do a search in spotlight, I get a bunch of safari history items (which I wish I could turn off). If I click on one of them, I get a warning telling me that I am about to open an application. I never got this before the 10.5.2 update.
Anybody else notice this?
Mark

I turned off webpages in the preferences and I still get safari history and bookmarks in the results. And I did a quick check were I searched for the same item with the preference turned on and then off and I got the exact amount of results. I don't think that preference is working or, I don't understand it.
Those files that say they are apps are located in Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History.
I'm tempted to trash the spotlight preference file and see if this fixes it...
Mark

Web history item is a downloaded application?

I used Spotlight to search for an item. Selecting the spotlighted item produced this warning:
'"feed/%2F%2Fwww.macnn.com%2Fmacnn.rss.webhistory" is an application which was downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?
Safari.app downloaded this file yesterday at 6:58 PM.
Cancel Open'
Now, I checked the file info; the file I attempted to open is not an application. Further, attempting to open every Safari history item provokes this warning.
It seems strange to me that a Safari history item might provoke such a warning. Does anyone have a clue what's happening here?

Why we get the warning for those items is a mystery to me too. I also get them, and have been mystified as to why such a thing would be considered "an application downloaded from the Internet" when it doesn't strike ME as being an application, although clearly it did come from the Internet. The warnings in general are a result of a security update and AFAIK there is no way to turn them off or edit what items are on the list of things worthy of a warning.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Search syntax for Safari history? how to remove items from specific pages?

I'm using Safari 5.0.3 and I prefer keeping the browsing history quite long for accessing contents I had been searching in the net some weeks ago.
However, that way I'm collecting lots of clutter and therefore I'd like to remove selected entries from the history, e. g. from the page where I'm reading daily news etc.
I tried to use the search field (accessible with Cmd-F in the history view) to search for parts of the corresponding web address, e. g. "http://www.heute.de", but I do not only get the history items from that site but many others from google and other pages.
So I'd like to know: is there a search syntax to use the search field, like address=www.heute.de* which enables wild cards, operators like OR/AND etc.?
If not, is there a 3rd party tool which can help or can I use spotlight/the finder to find and remove the unwanted items from the browser history?

Hi beckmart
there might be ready-made apps or add-ons to do that - but this may help...
quit safari, open Home/Library/Safari/History.plist using PrefSetter
enter the url you want removed in the search box, no need for quotes - say www.google.com
expand the 'web history dates' section at left to see individual results, then select the first one & shift-click the last (don't use select all) to highlight/select all the results - then press the delete key to remove them. Then save the file.
Naturally, a backup copy of history.plist would be wise - but the above seems to work very well.

Safari history limited to 100000 items

Why is Safari history limited to 100000 items although set to be removed manually? Is it a bug?
This happens in Safari 6.0.1 (8536.26.14) and OS X 10.8.2 but also happened in 10.7 — but it didn’t AFAIR prior to 10.5.

I have done a bit of digging and contributor LeonieDF has come up with this:
How about this:
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/09/04/terminal-tips-change-safaris-history-limit/
Limit to number of items:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitHistoryItemLimit 2000
Limit to number of days:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitHistoryAgeInDaysLimit 30
It has been tested and does not balk at 200,000.
So you could try setting it at 1,000,000! Post back in a few years to tell us if it worked!

How do I open multiple history items and restore my last session from more than the last day

I see I can open 1 history item ant a time how can I open more than 1 if my browser crashed or was force quitted. Also is there a way to open previous items from before I day if I lunch safari and don't open my recent items using history.

From your Safari menu bar. Click History / Reopen all windows from last session.
If Safari is quitting unexpectedly, try resetting Safari. From the menu bar click Safari / Reset Safari. Select the top 7 buttons, click Reset.
If that doesn't help, If Safari has just crashed, press the Report button on the CrashReporter dialog box to view the crash information.
Copy/paste the entire contents of the Crash Reporter window into your reply. If the crash report dialog does not appear or the crash is hard to reproduce, crash logs can be retrieved from the ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter> folder.

Remove History Items After 1 Day

I have Safari's prefs for "Remove history items" set to "After 1 day", however it doesn't clear my history after 1 day. In fact it behaves as if it's set to "manual". Is this a bug? There was another post that is now archived that indicated that this is probably a bug, but that was from 2009. Surely, by now a bug in the first tab of the preferences pane should have been patched. Or am I missing something? I've cleared history and cache a few times to no avail. Any help?

Try deleting the cache associated with Safari...
Quit Safari.
Open the Finder. From the Finder menu bar click Go > Go to Folder
Type of copy/paste: ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari
Click Go then move the Cache.db file from the com.apple.Safari folder to the Trash.
Relaunch Safari. See if that makes a difference...
If not, check Safari > Preferences > Extensions. If there are any installed, turn that OFF, quit and relaunch Safari to test.

Transfer Safari HIstory

I have both a MacBook Pro and an iMac which I use regularly. I'd like to merge all of my history items from the laptop to the desktop so that I can see all of the items on the desktop. How can I do this?
Thanks!

Hi
yes you can, though it's not something Safari or OS X can do for you. But with the aid of some other software, it's easy enough (more so than the following step-by-step instructions make it seem) .
Get a copy of Prefsetter from http://www.nightproductions.net/
On each mac - look in Home/Library/Safari/ & locate the file History.plist.
You need to copy/email one of them to the other mac, or connect via a network so that both can be accessed.
Presumably, the history is important, so I suggest working on renamed duplicates until you're sure it's panned out. Let's assume you have historyimac.plist & historymbp.plist.
Open historyimac.plist in Prefsetter, you'll see a entry named WebHistoryDates - click the arrow to expand it, and then select every item within it - with a long list, it's easiest to use Edit-Select all, and then command click the WebHistoryDates and WebHistoryFileVersion to de-select those two ( a long scroll down to the latter ).
You need only the Item 1 - Item xxx highlighted. Now use Edit-Copy to copy them to the clipboard.
Now open historymbp.plist in Prefsetter
Select WebHistoryDates and then use Edit-Paste to paste the clipboard contents into it. You should see the 'xxx items' change to reflect the extra ones - note that the paste may take several seconds or more for thousands of items.
Use File-Save As to save that file as mergedHistory.plist - the resulting file will be much larger than the sum of the two you opened… don't worry, Safari will take care of that for us.
With Safari quit, you now need to move History.plist out from the Safari folder, and place mergedHistory.plist in there - then rename it History.plist.
Open Safari, and you should have history reflecting both macs. If not, & things went South - quit Safari & replace the original History.plist to revert.
It works perfectly here, but be aware that Safari will remove duplicate sites in history, leaving just the most recently visited entries.

Safari history not clearing

My Safari preferences are set to removing history items after one day but it doesnt do squat... Whats up with that?

You need to quit and relaunch Safari to clear the old history.
(75017)

My Safari history tab has disappeared from my bookmarks. How Can I retrieve it?

My History tab in Safari has disappeared from my bookmarks on my iPad 2. Hw Can I retrieve it

There used to be a setting where you could set limits on the Safari history but those settings are gone now. IIRC, the settings were for 100 items, 150, 200 or something like that. It was a number of items in the history list and not a number of days. Since iOS a devices can sync bookmarks with Safari on your computer now, perhaps, that is where the history limit can be adjusted.
I am not a good judge of how long the history is retained because I erase my history and website data on a fairly regular basis. With the reading list feature and the ability to create a shortcut on the home screen for websites, I don't often find the need to go back to my history for weeks in the past.

"Safari History Items" in Spotlight

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