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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @09:28AM
I remember when every site could be bookmarked. A typical page had a single, identifiable URL which could be written down, copied, bookmarked, e-mailed etc. Now thanks to "applications" you have to screenshot, copy or analyze what creators tried to achieve with obfuscated code.
Now not every site can be even searched - content is dynamically loaded and "infinite scrolling" forces users to use non-efficient and buggy on-page search boxes. These boxes are less and less functional, while a few years ago it was possible in virtually every of them to exclude something some way, now it's just not implemented.
So it's not only normal that users are not computer literate, but it is also normal that the marketing-oriented Web makes them less computer literate as this results in increase of sales.