College students stumped by search engines
This link was forwarded to me by Sam Hunting.
That college students can’t do adequate searching isn’t a surprise.
What did surprise me was the finding: “…90 percent of American Google users do not know how to use CTRL or Command+F to find a word on a page.”
That finding was reported in: Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F.
Or as it appears in the article:
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!'”
How should this finding influence subject identity tests and/or user interfaces for topic maps?
Should this push us towards topic map based data products, as data products, not topic maps?
[…] you suggest Ctrl-F, see Do You Ctrl-F?. What was it you were saying about […]
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