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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Does everyone here know they can right-click the “Start” button to bring up a context menu, to open Windows Explorer?
In general, right-click gives “more choices” in Windows, in many contexts.
Duke C. says:
August 21, 2011 at 10:40 am
WordPress automatically changes text only youtube links into embedded videos. I realise that really bites for dialup users, but no-one ever said life was fair. 😉 I vaguely recall reading somewhere that one can set the browser to display just the text in webpages? Anyone?
Well, I was going to reply to one of the comments above that I had read earlier today, but this afternoon when I came back to this thread it was too long and tedious to scroll through all the comments and I can’t seem to find it now. If only there were some way to quickly search this whole thread . . . 🙂
I love it when Sir Anthony posts articles like this… So many useful “geek” tips show up in the comments. I particularly like the “/” one.
I have a tip that might just save your marriage one day. If you find yourself getting tired and irritable due to spending long hours in front of your computer, use the off button and things will improve enormously.
Cheers!
Dave Springer,
Tried it. Got 8 hits on “plaigiarizing mofo.”☺
C. Shannon says: “Also you can skip the CTRL+F bit and just press ‘/’ and it brings up the search bar and puts the cursor in place.”
Sehr niftlich! Works in Opera, too.
I probably have some WordStar files on this machine, somewhere. All the CTRL-x functions still work. I used to like to tell my co-workers about the undocumented feature (invert screen or some such nonsense) invoked with CTRL-ALT-NUM PAD period. Doesn’t reboot, anymore, though. It just calls the Task Manager.
i believe that Dave Springer was the first guy on this page to bring up the subject of word processing software when at 11:17 AM on 21 August he wrote:
I got WordStar 3.3 for CP/M bundled with a Kaypro Business Pack I bought for my office about thirty years ago, and modified the program in hex to incorporate a spooling function that enabled the editing of one file while another was being sent to that big, noisy Juki 6100 daisy-wheel printer included with Kaypro’s “Darth Vader’s Lunchbox” in the Business Pack.
That same “CTRL-F” function has been incorporated in all the word processing software I’ve since worked with, including PC-Write, the shareware program that could be run in MS-DOS from a 3.5-inch microfloppy disk without difficulty (and was therefore shirt-pocket portable from one machine to another) when I finally transitioned from CP/M to the Windows environment.
When I began fiddling with Web browsers back in the 1990s – starting with Netscape Navigator – the “CTRL-F” function (insofar as I recall) was already well-established in such software, too.
I’m using Firefox 6.0 right now (and its “feeping creaturism” is making me regret the upgrade more than a little bit as it routinely eats up clock cycles on my aged CPU). I keep that “Find” function open pretty much all the time.
But it’s nice to learn that I’m apparently a smarter computer user than about 90% of people who browse the Web.
Hell, I oughta be.
My free iPhone / Climategate app is a handy reference to the emails, for times when you dont have an Internet connection – such as during your daily commute. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/climategate/id386480628 .
Amazing what you can learn just reading the emails, or the highlight link reference reproduced (with permission) from Australian Scientist John Costella’s excellent analysis. I only really came to appreciate the full depth of what the Climategate scientists did, while creating the app.
True Northist says:
“I vaguely recall reading somewhere that one can set the browser to display just the text in webpages? Anyone?”
If you know the “a href” HTML command you can link to the video with a word or phrase, like this.
For Windoze users Alt+F4 or Alt+Tab will get you out of Kiosk mode.
From the run box: iexplore -k whatsupwiththat.com
Caution! Opens Internet Exploder!
clipe says:
August 21, 2011 at 12:32 pm
As clipe says, in the Windows world, F3 brings up the search box and Esc gets rid of it.
Why press two keys when one will do?
DirkH says
“A similar trick: If you look for graphs that show the dependency of one variable of another, go to images.google.com and enter the two names of the variables.”
This should be an interesting tool, but I put in debt and year and it seems that google has no ability to display information past 2008/2009. Similary for deficit, year. Everything stops with Bush, no Obama information
I wonder what predisposition enables Google images to filter the facts?
Delete One
And for us old bifocal folks. Press Ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel.
Hint for old DOS-habituated keystroke-loving coots like me: There’s a subfamily of Windows programs that are strongly focused on single-letter keystrokes. Most of these are made by ex-Soviet area programmers, and most are elegant and amazingly fast compared to Western-made progs. Look up “Eastern Orthodox editors” to get a look at some of these.
Am I going OT here?
If you have trouble remembering your various identities and passwords associated with bookmarks…
Right click bookmark, >properties>location. Add question mark to url followed by (coded?) username and password.
Username password will appear in address bar next time you open bookmark..
It seems to be somewhat different on the Mac. I clicked on:
Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> “Search for text when I start typing” (2nd option from the top)
And CTRL+SHIFT+Tab moves from tab to tab in the reverse direction (so you can retrace your steps).
Interestingly I can remember finding this function. I did it just by guessing – I wanted to find something so logic suggested Ctrl-F. Good ergonomics, so the interesting point is that so few have found this function. Suggests to me they fail to imagine the possibility and have faith in the programmers. If they imagine a search facility would help them (as I did), and have faith that the browser was programmed by someone who would realise this, then they would either try Ctrl-F or at least look in the menu for the function.
Billy Liar:
“in the Windows world, F3 brings up the search box and Esc gets rid of it.
Why press two keys when one will do?”
Ergonomics.
Firstly I can actually hit Ctrl-F more quickly than F3, as both keys are ones I use frequently so can hit by simply looking toward the keyboard; I have to look at function keys directly. More importantly Ctrl-F is obvious enough that I found it by guessing, indeed it was my first guess. F3 I would have to find out then learn.
RossD says:
August 21, 2011 at 4:14 pm
And for us old bifocal folks. Press Ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel.
I was just about to bring that subject up. 😉
On the Ctrl-F history. Before there was CP/M, there were graphical editors that ran on timesharing systems. A popular editor then was emacs (short for “editing macros”) written in a concise language that just happened to be the command language for an editor called TECO (text editor and corrector, IIRC). Both are still around, though emacs was rewritten in a variant of Lisp. The original authors are still around. Richard Stallman wrote emacs, I first met him when he crashed a DEC User Society meeting and told everyone if they weren’t using emacs they didn’t deserve to be using computers. He’s mellowed a little bit, though the last time I saw him was when he was an invited speaker at Franklin Pierce Law School. The person who introduced Stallman said he was a pioneer in “Open Source Software.” Stallman interrupted to point out it was “Free Software,” as in his Free Software Foundation and that “Open Source software” may not be covered under the FSF’s “Copyleft” license and therefore he rejects Open Source code as something to be respected.
I figured it wouldn’t take long.
Oh – In Emacs Ctrl-F moves the cursor forward one character (it took a while before keyboards got cursor keys). Ctrl-S is used to start a search. Woe to the newbie who stumbles his way into emacs. The best way to get out is Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C, but since you can switch between several files (and display files in sub windows) I start emacs when I boot the system and exit when the power goes off.
I also have the “It’s All Text” Firefox add-on and have it configured so I can shift editing one of these text subwindows to emacs.
TrueNorthist says:
August 21, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Duke C. says:
August 21, 2011 at 10:40 am
Those of you who like to embed YouTube videos, could you post just the link instead?
WordPress automatically changes text only youtube links into embedded videos. I realise that really bites for dialup users, but no-one ever said life was fair. 😉 I vaguely recall reading somewhere that one can set the browser to display just the text in webpages? Anyone?
————
With Opera Browser you can press F12 and untick the item “Enable Plug-Ins”
remember to re-enable it again. Other quick configuration options are there too.
The Full Monty is here: http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.50/en/keyboard.html
OT: On searching for past posts at WUWT.
Over on Tips and notes is:
I frequently hunt down old references for people who’ve forgotten about them or who weren’t here when they were hot news. I often start with the search window up at the top of this page. It will search text in all the WUWT posts, but not comments. Usually good, sometimes not. Next is generally Google, which does look at comments. I’ll often add |site:wattsupwiththat.com| to restrict hits to WUWT (I like to use vertical bars as quotes for search strings).
For this, let’s see. I generally start too broad and narrow if necessary. Using the WordPress search box I looked for |when children should die|. Die is a pretty good word, though it can apply to bacteria, trees, animals, and computer companies.
The first page of results didn’t have a match (visual search), but I wasn’t surprised, it was a couple years ago. (Search results are in inverse chronological order.) Aha! On the second page, I see:
Oh rats, my ancient Netscape just crashed. Another reason to use It’s All Text, I still have my emacs buffer. Restarting Netscape, I see:
TV Network Tells Kids How Long Their Carbon Footprint Should Allow Them to Live
Posted on May 31, 2008 by Anthony Watts
This is environmentalism jumping the shark: Click image above to play the game I don’t know where to begin, except to say that when we see things like this, we should complain loudly and incessantly. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has …
Oh, the link in Tips and Notes goes to a May 26, 2008 story. I should have simply started with my monthly table of contents at http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/toc_2008_05.html – it’s the very first item (last post of the month)!
No followup in June that I see. I do see “Thanks to you [readers] I’ve hit another traffic high with over 402,000 unique page views for the month of May.” Hah – we do that in 5 days now.
Aug 20: 85,957,910 views to date
Aug 15: 85,551,233
Ric Werme,
Very good analysis, thanks. In addition, WUWT has had 650,000 reader comments posted from all over the world, in less than 5 years.
At 5:30 PM on 21 August, Ric Werme just had to bring up Emacs and TECO from the days when a “minicomputer” was something the size of a restaurant refrigerator and the PDP-11 was the neatest gadget on the planet.
And then he evoked rms Oy, gevalt! Guaranteed to get us old farts flashing back on the ’70s and the ’80s, when Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” suckage represented absolutely the worst we thought could possibly come out of the Oval Office.
Little did we know, right?
So are we now gonna start reminiscing about Guy Steele and Eric S. Raymond and quoting our favorite Jargon File entries?
While we’re on the subject, ( and I hate to sound technologically incompetent here, but I sure can be sometimes) how do you make a previous commenter’s or guest post appear in Italics?
For the life of me, I can’t figure it out, and I’ve just been putting the whole thing in quotations.