A recent article on The Atlantic cited a study by Google Anthropologist Dan Russell which showed that 90% of users don’t know how to use the Ctrl-F function.
If you’re one of those 90%, you may not know that the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F, in almost any Web browser (and, incidentally, most other applications including Word & Excel), brings your cursor to a small search box which allows you to type in a word or phrase – and if that word or phrase appears in the web page you’re currently viewing, it will be highlighted on your screen. You can usually use buttons provided beside the “find in page” search box to move forward and backward to the next or previous mention of your searched word or phrase.
“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!’” [Via The Atlantic]
Like many of the other sites that cited this story (and another (Mozilla) who contributed similar evidence to this discussion), I was genuinely astounded by this statistic. As a heavy web content consumer, it would be next-to-impossible to get through a day without using Ctrl-F. If I’m seeking a specific piece of information on a text-heavy website, I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of time it would take to locate it if I had to scan manually through all of the content.
Although Ctrl-F is an everyday shortcut for me, perhaps there are other “obvious” browsing tools that may not be so obvious to everyone. Have you had an “aha” moment about a simple tool you know have adopted into regular use? Have you had to teach someone (a colleague? Relative?) about Ctrl-F or something similar? I’d be curious to hear your experiences – hit the comments!
Ctrl-F functionality in Firefox. Most browsers work the same way with slight differences in location of the "Find in Page" box.
