SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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!'"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ron on Tuesday December 24 2019, @03:17AM
The real shocker is that anyone is surprised by this at all. We all learn to read and write in grade school, but how many people *really* know how to read and write? I didn't learn how to read properly until I tried to write a novel and joined a critique group, then realized I'd been reading all wrong and missing a whole lot of content I didn't even know was there.
In that group I met a woman who was making a seven figure income selling "chroma-therapy" treatments. No joke. Apparently color can change your physiology. Who knew?
Meanwhile, how many people know how to use punctuation like semicolons, commas and apostrophes correctly? Spell their, there and they're; its and it's; your and you're?
(Did I do that right? Are you sure? American or British rules? Modern or archaic? According to which style authority?)
We are all blithering idiots in someone else's area of expertise. It's one against seven billion. A ten percent hit rate seems pretty good to me.