I stumbled on an odd iTunes feature, today, when selecting a song in my iTunes library, and pressing a keyboard shortcut. Instead of pressing Command-Shift-R to show the file in the Finder, I accidentally pressed Command-Shift-L. This bounced me to Safari, and performed a web search for the selected track.
It’s not a very “clean” search; it performed a search for all of the visible information in my iTunes library. The Google search field contained this text:
Cirkus 6:27 King Crimson Lizard 1970 4 12/17/14, 1:51 PM 1 of 5 842 kbps
That’s the name of a track, its duration, the artist, album, year, play count, last play date and time, track number, and bit rate. That data corresponds to the columns that are visible in my iTunes library. Hiding or showing any columns, then preforming the same search, only searches for the visible columns. Also, note that this only works when you are viewing your iTunes library or a playlist in Songs view, or another type of list view (such as Movie List, Audiobook List, etc.).
This search “feature” is a bit odd. It’s not very useful as it is, since it sends a search for all the visible tags. If it allowed you to search for, say, Name, Artist, and Album, it could be a way to quickly search the web for information about a song, leading you to an artist’s page, a Wikipedia page, or something else. Or to perform a web search for a selected movie, which might lead you to an IMDB page.
You may find this useful; I find it to be a curiosity. Like a feature that was in progress and never got removed, or a vestige of a feature that didn’t make the cut in iTunes.
Update: As a commenter points out, this is coming from the iTunes > Services menu. I don’t know how old that Search with Google service is, but that’s a good tip too. Select any text anywhere, press Command-Shift-L, and it’ll search in your default browser. This has been around for a long time; I find it mentioned in a 2004 article in MacTech about Mac OS X Services.