Every “Application” on the Mac should have it’s own distinct preferences menu. 

There are very few specific apps that won’t have a preferences menu. As a hypothetical example, imagine an app that does no more than move the mouse to the dead center of screen on press of command-shift-C. 

Eventually that app will get preferences due to developer frustration or user feedback. Someone will eventually desire to change the keyboard command. ( though altering keyboard commands as of Mac OS X Lion can now be done natively in the OS itself.  Here is a list of the top keyboard shortcuts which I recommend all users memorize.

There are some other oddities within the System Preferences which control  how the system itself works. Mouse, keyboard, display, etc are just a few of the Preferences in the System Preference Panes. ( A.K.A. Sys Pref Pane or just Pref Pane or System Prefs )

Finally, there are applications — each application most likely will have a preference menu. 

My personal method to locate a menu rather than digging through ~20 menus each with sub-menu’s is to Press Command-? Or select “help” from the far right menu. A text input field will display. Type in the first few letters or a “sub-string” of the feature you are looking for. 

The help menu will then visually/physically spawn open the menu and select it. You can press return or enter and it will be the same as if you had manually dug around for hours. 

The one slightly tricky part is the Mac OS X Finder. The Finder is a semi-faceless application. But an application nonetheless. You don’t need the finder to run most apps, but may be limited in some file open/save dialogs. ( In general, the Finder should be running at all times sans perhaps a server setup that loads  only to the login window yet still allowing background faceless apps such as Apache, MySQL, Postresql, Named/BIND, and other server style apps )  But the Finder itself does have a preference menu. This contrasts what you see when no applications are visible. Icon size, position, labels, spring loaded folders, new windows open at what defined location, amongst much more. 

For your Safari issue, activate Safari to the foreground app, confirming you have by making sure to the right of the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your screen reads, in this case “Safari”. Every active app will show its name in the top most menu bar directly to the right of the Apple Logo if it is the front most application. This is true 100% of the time baring application crashes , application stalls, application hangs, and application freezes. All problems are usually alleviated by selecting “Force Quit” from The Finder menu.  

Another method, the one I use most, is a keyboard shortcut. If I need to view Safari Prefs. I would press command-space to open spotlight search. I would then type “Sa” for “Safari” which will find Safari and press enter to launch or bring to foreground the Safari app.. ( I use a dedicated app named LaunchBar ) with my desired app in the foreground ( no application window need be open, merely the app’s name listed to the right of the Apple Menu ) I then press command-comma.

Command-comma is, as far as I know, globally trustable to open the preferences to any app in the foreground. You can skip the search via Spotlight, or LaunchBar as in my case. 

I find LaunchBar an indispensable utility. It’s not hard to learn — it just works. 

Tuning it in custom ways can be confusing.  *Hint: if you are a bit OCD about order and cleanliness, you may not like that LaunchBar returns many results that to you might appear irrelevant. 

You can alter and change this, though even with my penchant for organizing of files, I leave LaunchBar preferences modtly alone. For most of its use, it is “out of site; out of mind”, meaning I won’t even see the clutter if you could even call it that. Once you learn it, LaunchBar is like typing, you stop looking at the keys. In this case, LaunchBar gets smarter the more you use it, reducing that clutter. 

I suppose the best and fastest answer is learn command-comma to access preferences. 99.9% of apps use this command combo. The others are rare, server apps, faceless apps, or may simply lack preferences. 

*I’m strongly endorsing LaunchBar. I get no affiliate commission, commission, kickback, or similar. I am simply promoting that which I like through word of mouth/web. 

I hope that helps. 
Scott

I’m assuming you have done the usual obvious changes like altering the preferences to change from Bing to Google?

If not, give that a try. 

When that doesn’t work, select the Reset Safari menu from the Safari menu. You will be given several options of what to reset. Checking all will restore Safari to how it was when you first booted your computer. 

Start out a little conservative, check off a few obvious reset items like preferences or cookies, quit Safari, and do a search test. 

If none of those work, reset all and see how that goes. If a reset all doesn’t work, I think I have one other option.

Here is what you will be looking at for the first suggestion. 
http://georgetasioulis.com/how-to-restore-default-settings-on-safari-mac-os-x-lion/

Next up, quit all browsers and open Chrome. Look in the preferences for Chrome and set the default search engine to Google. Do a few searches in Chrome and quit. 

Re-launch Chrome and now look to the Chrome preferences to set Chrome to the default browser. Yes, that’s correct, we are changing the default browser to a non-Safari browser. 

With that done, quit Chrome and open a link. Make sure Chrome open on its own. Make sure Chrome is using google. If it is, one last trip to the preferences of Chrome to set Safari as the default browser again, and that should do it. 

If none of those work, create a new account on your computer. Login to that account and see if the problem follows you. 

If it does, the problem is at a System Level. If the problem is not there, the issue is a local account one, and will be solved by fixing it in the local account, or moving your data from the “corrupt” local account, to the newly created clean account. 

Let us know what your results were. 

You can also prohibit cookies there as well, however, doing so will make near all but the simplest of websites stop working for you.

I am not sure what you mean by “undermined by Apache” but Apache is a web server, and more than likely not something you should be running. I would avoid it and consider it a very advanced feature. If it is causing you problems, disable it by unchecking “Web Sharing” is the same “Sharing” preferences area I linked the image to.

Unless you need to share files with another user, you can actually disable most, if not all of the checkboxes in the sharing preferences. If you do want to share files with another user on a Mac or PC, you will need to click ON the “File Sharing” checkmark in the “Sharing” preferences.

If your goal is Mac to PC sharing, that can become a challenge as you also will need to make changes on the PC to allow it to share files. That can mean changes to the PC’s sharing, firewall, and virus settings, which is a lot.

In those cases, as well as in many Mac cases, I suggest uses simply install DropBox for file sharing. It is free and offers much more than just sharing of files. I rely on it daily. You can join through my referral link here: http://db.tt/sSd7dtZ

I will also email you an invite in case that is easier for you. By all means, try to use Apple’s built in sharing, but look over what DropBox has to offer, as for free, it may have other value to you than the built in file sharing of Mac OS X.

Gary

You do not need Safari open to delete these files, Safari should actually be closed. From my previous reply:

Possible locations for the preferences are in your Library folder, you should see a Preferences folder, files named com.apple.Safari.plist and also any folders named Safari will be suspect.

If the file does not have the name “safari” in it, I would leave it alone. I certainly wold not delete files in the Preference Pane folder.

Hope that helps.

At this point, my only suggestion would be to quit Safari, which seems to be the simple part and then start looking for the preferences that control Safari. Once you find those, move them aside, or delete them if you are feeling brave. See if that solves it for you.

Possible locations for the preferences are in your Library folder, you should see a Preferences folder, files named com.apple.Safari.plist and also any folders named Safari will be suspect.

With the preferences removed, the next time you open Safari it will make them new again. You will see a file called bookmarks.plist. You may want to hold onto that, as that contains your bookmarks. There may be a chance that corruption in that file is causing this, and you will have to be with a clean slate of bookmarks.

Good luck.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0