Sunday, August 21, 2011

I've been wating my life! Control+f keys save time and effort!

How many times have you searched for a topic and been led to a bajillion page document that had the info you needed, but it took for ever to find it? It happens to me all of the time, especially when doing research on historical or technical subjects.

I, like most people, scan the document looking for the key words that pertain to what I am looking for. Sometimes, the reference is so hidden that I give up and move to the next recommendation. I have wasted hours and hours scanning for the elusive information.

Apparently, my efforts were unnecessary. Google has had a solution to my problem all along, but wasn't very good at letting people know about it. All you have to do is hit "control+f" and a small bar comes up at the bottom of the page. Enter a key word and the document will be searched for that word. When found, it will be highlighted.

Many of you probably knew this, but according to Google's research, 90% of us don't! Google has researchers who study how we search for things on the web. They determined that 90% of us will manually read the document or the index, scanning for the info, when control+f would have done the same thing in a second or two.

Who knew?

The article that I found on the matter can be found here:

http://search.slashdot.org/story/11/08/20/0056221/Most-People-Have-Never-Heard-of-CTRLF?utm_source=feedburnerGoogle+Reader&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I tried it and found that it works.

I hope this helps some of you out in your quest for knowledge. I am, after all. here to help!

Thanks for reading,
Schmoe

3 comments:

  1. In many web browsers, F3 does the same thing as control+F

    ReplyDelete
  2. One can also just move the mouse up to "edit" on the top tool bar of the screen, then click on "Find" which - control+f. It's actually what I prefer to do.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anon and Anon _ Well there ya go. I actually learned THREE things today, useful easy things that will save me time and effort. Thanks for the tips and the comment.

    ReplyDelete