I was surprised to learn that many people don’t know what I know about how to find things in web pages and documents. For as many comments and web pages we have on WUWT, I wanted to make sure everybody knows this. There’s a test at the end.
From Slashdot:
Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don’t know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. ‘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,’ says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. ‘
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!”‘ Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we’re looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. ‘I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don’t use it at all,’ writes Madrigal.
‘We’re talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don’t spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.’
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OK, knowing that, who had in WUWT Tips and Notes (the largest online web page we have) the word “Chilean” in their tip? Just navigate there and use CTRL+F.
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Another useful search tip:
How to limit your Google search to a single web site (or a sub-set of that site).
Google this:
Hansen site:/wattsupwiththat.com
Then, Google this:
Hansen site:/wattsupwiththat.com/2011
You can use the embedded search at the top of the WUWT page. But, in my experience, embedded searches are not very reliable (and, you cannot use it to search a sub-set of the site).
C. Shannon says:
August 21, 2011 at 8:53 am
Also you can skip the CTRL+F bit and just press ‘/’ and it brings up the search bar…
Now, that I did not know! I’ve been using CTRL+F for years but never knew about the “/” method. Shame it doesn’t have “next/previous” options, but I’m sure I’ll still use it occasionally. Nice tip.
Okay, here is my tip. To save looking through a thread on which I have made a comment , I put in my own name, if I get more than 1 match I know someone has responded and I select next to read the reply or move on to the next thread.
I regularly find myself telling people about ctrl+ functions because they always work, whereas right-click pull-down menus sometimes don’t materialize. Years ago I got quite bad mouse-RSI and out of self-defence went a-hunting for ways of doing things without the mouse. ctrl+v is invaluable if you are doing multiple pasting – and fast!
Using Ctrl-F within Tips and Notes is useful for finding out whether or not someone else has already posted the same information. Saves time and bandwidth.
While we’re on the subject of Tips and notes-
Those of you who like to embed YouTube videos, could you post just the link instead? Tips and Notes loads painfully slow for those of us with dial-up or XRTT connections.
Thank you for your consideration.
I find these Control-whatever commands to be a blasted nuissance. Having fat fingers syndrome, I often hit two keys at once and I’m forever turning some annoying function on and I don’t know how turn it off! Usually it’s some annoying overtype feature!
This doesn’t surprise me. Twenty-two years of providing PC and network technical support led me to conclude most people learn exactly what they think (or what they are shown) they need to know to get their job done on a computer and aren’t often interested in putting in effort on their own to search for easier methods. “I didn’t know you could do that” was an often heard phrase.
Control-F search has been around at least since WordStar days 30 years ago when I first started using it. It’s been the standard in almost everything since then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
Maybe most people are just too familiar with Unix and they keep looking for a shortcut key for GREP. 😉
Been using Firefox ‘Find’ for years, but I didn;t know about this:
C. Shannon says:
August 21, 2011 at 8:53 am
“…. just press ‘/’ and it brings up the search bar and puts the cursor in place.
REALLY useful tip – thanks!
Taphonomic says:
August 21, 2011 at 10:11 am
Ctrl-F works fine, but as usual with Microsoft products there is another way to accomplish the same thing.
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Indeed, for those that may not know, the menus across the top of the application often have letters underlined. Like the word File at the top of my Firefox web-browser. Press the “Alt” key on the keyboard, and then the unlined letter. In this case it would be the letter “F”. So, key combination “Alt+F” drops a menu down with several options. To the right in the menu, there is other key combinations that would bypass the drop down. So, “Alt+F” and then P, would print, or one could simply “Ctrl+P”. Note, that once the drop down menu is activated, one can use the “arrow” buttons (the right arrow if starting at the File drop down) to peruse other shortcut keystrokes.
Using a mouse is cool, but when it comes to speed, keystrokes are the bomb! Some IE users will have to change the view before the menu will be shown.
Doug in Seattle says:
August 21, 2011 at 9:46 am
“Lots of other old DOS commands still work besides CTRL-F. I suppose it shows my age, but I use them often. Some of us were using computers before windows and mice came along.”
A fewer number of us were using CTRL-F before DOS came along. Digital Research CP/M in my case. WordStar for CP/M came out in 1978. My first personal computer was an Altair-8800 purchased at auction around 1979 from a company called Pertec in Irvine, CA which was quickly going out of business. They had acquired MIPS, the maker of the Altair, in 1976. Lots of interesting stuff at that auction. I also picked up a pair of double-sided double-density 8″ floppy disk drives for a song. Those babies would hold 1.2megs each. I could put Digital Research Pascal on a single floppy and use the other for program store. I wire wrapped my own floppy controller card for the S-100 bus Altair using a Western Digital floppy controller chip. I also wire wrapped my own S-100 RS-232 serial interface card and, also purchased at the Pertec auction, a clunky old black and white RS-232 terminal.
When I was taking structured programming in college in the late 1970’s Pascal was the language being used in the courses. My prof agreed to let me use my homebuilt machine to do my homework assignments instead of the HP-2000 mini-computer on the college campus. In fact I think all but one prof let me do that as I also had Basic, Fortran, and Assembly language for the old Altair. The prof that didn’t let me do it was in a class on microprocessor archtecture where we had to write an emulator in Fortran for a hypothetical microprocessor. The prof had to be able to submit a program written in the hypothetical machine language and the emulator had to produce the proper results. We had to emulate all the shift registers and stuff in the hypothetical uP. It was a bit on the difficult side even for me but mine worked flawlessly. Cognizant of the challenge in the term project and aware of my level of talent in computer architecture and programming I asked the prof after the last class was over “So how did everyone do on the emulator?” He smiled and said “Abysmal. Yours was the only one that worked correctly.” That was my favorite computer prof. We used to hang for a while after class talking about the brand spanking new, not yet released for production, Intel 8086 microprocessor which were both keenly interested in and was very far beyond anything being taught at the university. Back in those days the university courses in computer science were years behind the bleeding edge in industry.
I have SO many stories from the old days. One of my first designs where I was a principle engineer was a portable computer (CP/M based, STD bus) that appeared on the cover of Popular Science in 1981 alongside the KayPro, Osbourne, and a few others. I first met Michael Dell around 1988 when he wasn’t yet old enough to drink and his company was called PC Limited. He’d advanced by then beyond selling refurbished IBM PCs out his dorm room at UT but it wasn’t long after that point.
I actually prefer the shift+insert shortcut for paste. It is not only more intuitive, but it is much easier and quicker to type for me.
Another thing that can save a lot of time is to use a feed reader instead of a browser for blogs and other rapidly-changing content sites. If the site offers a “full feed” (this one doesn’t), I can read most of an article in the time it takes the full site to load in a browser. Best of all, the feed reader checks intermittently, so I don’t have to. And I don’t miss any postings, the way that I do when I find links in my Twitter stream.
BFL says:
August 21, 2011 at 9:11 am
Ctrl-f…….ahhhh but what is the keyboard shortcut for closing the search tab once opened (no mouse clicks allowed).
Could it be the “Esc” key?
Ctrl + D bookmarks the page.
BFL says:
August 21, 2011 at 9:11 am
Ctrl-f…….ahhhh but what is the keyboard shortcut for closing the search tab once opened (no mouse clicks allowed).
oh, the humble key of yore.
C. Shannon says:
August 21, 2011 at 8:53 am
Also you can skip the CTRL+F bit and just press ‘/’ and it brings up the search bar and puts the cursor in place.
Try it =)
Thank you! I didn’t know about that feature either.
Even more useful tip.
Install Google toolbar, highlight a word or phrase on a web page with a sweep of your mouse, hit CTL-C, and it’s automatically transferred into the Google search box.
Instant expert in a box on almost any subject imaginable given a few minutes lead time to find the information you need to make your argument or answer an argument. Google is the biggest advance in learning since the printing press if you ask me. Like being inside the library of congress and having the ability to move around and flip through books at the speed of light. Incredible. I’ve been using Google like a madman for going on 15 years and before that, since about 1993 when I went to work for Dell, I was using a Unix program called Archie, which is considered the first internet search engine. I was one of the first 500 people in Austin, TX to have a home broadband cable modem from Time/Warner. I got hooked up while it was still in the initial test phase. You to submit an application to get in on the rollout. It wasn’t generally available to the public until a year or two later. Up until that point my only high speed connection to the internet was from my office at Dell. I damn near lived in that office putting in my 8 hours for the company every day then spending another 8 hours surfing the web at night.
Actually I mispoke about Google toolbar. You don’t have to hit control-C anymore. Just highlight the phrase and as soon as you let go of your mouse button it appears in the search bar. It only works with Internet Explorer that way. In FireFox I still have to copy & paste. I usually use Firefox for searches and Internet Explorer for casual surfing. I may have to change my habits now.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:
August 21, 2011 at 9:04 am
Another incredibly useful FireFox feature is the plugin UnMHT that makes it possible to save web pages with pictures and all into a single file.
How does UnMHT compare to the ScreenGrab add-on I’m already using in Firefox?
F3 works and has “next/previous” options.
Shortcuts for Windows XP.
http://foliovision.com/seo-tools/computers/windows/xp-run-commands
Start+pause/break brings up System properties.
Alt+Prnt Scrn captures the active window. Useful for uploading screen captures.
Carsten;
Thanks for the unMHT addon.
Here are a few more:
Lazarus (status bar bug and context menu, recovers any typing into forms like this comment box)
ReadLater Saves page link to a searchable dated list
F3 repeats the last “Find on this page” (‘Find next’)
Here’s another good tip. Ever see somebody write like an expert a little TOO easily?
Catch them out by selecting a unique looking bit of text from their posting and google the snippet inside quotation marks so you only get back exact matches. If you get a hit and he didn’t credit the source you found yourself a plaigiarizing mofo. If you don’t get a hit then you should be suitably impressed because he’s probably written that off-the-cuff and really knows whereof he speaks if the stuff is accurate.
And: my #1 all time repeated recommendation: try and buy ClipMate. Everything saved/copied with Ctrl-C is archived, temporarily or permanently. Just check out clipmate.com — if you get it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
@BFL >>>Ctrl-f…….ahhhh but what is the keyboard shortcut for closing the search tab once opened (no mouse clicks allowed).
Esc(ape)