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90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F

posted by janrinok on Monday December 23 2019, @04:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the perhaps-they-can't-find-it dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday December 23 2019, @08:35PM (2 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday December 23 2019, @08:35PM (#935616)

    I've been criticized at times [soylentnews.org] for using "\" instead of "/" since I bind "/" to ctrl+f and, along with multiple language bindings, often end up just using the wrong slash out of lazy habit.

    Throw in the i3 bindings and how my laptop's touch pad is disabled since I like parking my wrists there, and you can see why no one wants to borrow my laptop. Well, that and the unmarked key caps... They say obscurity isn't security. But you try getting anything done when the keyboard isn't QWERTY or DVORAK since the damn thing keeps switching back and forth from command mode which I've scripted system wide.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday December 23 2019, @09:33PM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 23 2019, @09:33PM (#935639) Journal

    Lol, I see people looking at my i3 desktop and they can't figure out how to do anything but if I opened up a terminal, my 85 year old mother might be right at home: she taught me how to get around in DOS!

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