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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: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Wednesday December 25 2019, @06:55AM (1 child)
It could also just be the latest generation who does everything on their phones. It occurred to me that I didn't know how to search a web page on my phone. I found it, but it took a minute of poking around. Part of that is just me not being that familiar with my phone's web browser, given I almost never use it as I much prefer using the web on a PC - a big part of it is because of things like this. For those that do everything on their phones, using a desktop browser probably feels a bit foreign. So it's not surprising they wouldn't know CTRL-F or most other keyboard shortcuts since you can't do that on mobile. Well, not quite true - I found it does work if I have a Bluetooth keyboard paired, but almost no one does that.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday December 25 2019, @10:18AM
Interesting to know the Ctrl-F keyboard shortcut worked once there was a physical keyboard.
You're right though, about how rare it is. Even for myself I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a keyboard plugged into my phone(USB "on the go" adapter worked better than expected).