What percent of internet browser users know how to find text within a web page?

Earlier this week I watched an hour-long YouTube video from The MIT Press posted on July 8, 2020 and  titled Author Talk: The Joy of Search by Daniel M. Russell. He discusses his book, The Joy of Search. At about 42 minutes he talks about something not mentioned in the book - using the Find (Control F) command of a web browser to locate text in a web page. Then at 44 minutes he relates three statistics which surprised me.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, less than half (48.9%) of teachers using the internet knew how to do this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even worse, less than a tenth (9.5%) of U.S. English internet users knew how to do this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, most amazingly, just 7% of 50,000 Firefox browser users knew how to do this. The other 93% NEVER had used this command. I suspect this occurs because learning to use a browser is considered too simple to require careful instruction, so we often just get the Blind Leading the Blind.

 

Dan initially discussed this topic in a post at his SearchReSearch blog on February 22, 2010 which is titled Why Control-F is the single most important thing you can teach someone about search. It also is discussed in a pair of articles by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic: one on August 18, 2011 titled Crazy: 90 Percent of people don’t know how to use CTRL+F and another on August 22, 2011 titled Why using Control+F may be the most important computing skill. Daniel M. Russell and Mario Callegaro had yet another article at the  Scientific American Observations Blog on March 26, 2019 titled How to be a better web searcher: Secrets from Google scientists in which they said to learn some tricks:

 

“One is the find-text-on-page skill (that is, Command-F on Mac, Control-F on PC), which is unfamiliar to around 90 percent of the English-speaking, Internet-using population in the US. In our surveys of thousands of web users, the large majority have to do a slow (and errorful) visual scan for a string of text on a web site. Knowing how to use text-finding commands speeds up your overall search time by about 12 percent (and is a skill that transfers to almost every other computer application).”

 

The image was modified from Sebastian Vrancx’s pre-1650 painting of The Blind Leading the Blind at Wlikmedia Commons.