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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There are a number of answers to this. The 1st 2 involve using HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags (codes).
1. Easiest: Enclose the material between these two tags: <i> </i>
2. Next: Enclose the material between <blockquote> </blockquote> This also indents.
3. Most elaborate but eventually easier: Use the FireFox GreaseMonkey add-on, and install the CA Assistant ‘script’ (tool). It puts bolding, italics, linking, and more in an icon toobar over the Reply form.
Wow, all you PC users have my sympathy. I just apple-F like the other happy mac users.
But here’s something I have found extremely useful beyond searching on single pages: site search. It’s a feature of Google with endless uses when you wish to scan an entire blog for something you saw, say, last year some time, or to determine whether or not a site to which you’re new discusses let’s say, volcanoes:
After your Google search term, in the search field, add “site:” where can be anything location on the web. shortcut hint: you NEVER need the initial “www” that many sites use — that is automatically added if it is needed.
For example, to find every mention of Al Gore on wattsupwiththat.com, paste the following into the search field:
“Al Gore” site:wattsupwiththat.com
I just did this, and got about 15,100 hits.
Try the same on pjtv.com:
“Al Gore” site:pjtv.com
and I get 12,500 hits. Popular guy 🙂
Have fun everyone!
Tucci78 says:
August 21, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Of course – I have half a sentence in the Jargon file, a reference to a Carnegie Tech (now Carbegie Mellon Univ) frat that used thermite to weld a street car to the tracks on Forbes Ave.
ESR wins some credit for why I program in Python whenever I can get away with it.
… when Jimmy Carter’s …
I was working on a Heathkit stereo (AR 1214?) while Carter was winning the election. I accidentally soldered a couple transistors backward right around then. Fortunately they didn’t let out the magic smoke when I turned it on.
Hey, if there was ever a post to hijack with computer folklore, this is it! Open Flood Control Dam #1.
J. Felton says:
August 21, 2011 at 7:04 pm
See the bottom of my Guide to WUWT, http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html (or click the appropriate image on the right side navigation links near the top of the page).
It also has notes on special characters so you can “right” 20°C or El Niño.
“Get yourself a real editor” (take-off of a famous Dilbert comic) – I have an emacs macro where I highlight text, and use the macro to bracket the text with a <blockquote> command.
From Duke C. on August 21, 2011 at 10:40 am:
Got a Mozilla-derived browser like FIrefox, or Seamonkey or even Netscape? Get the FlashBlock plug-in and stop loading all of that unnecessary/unwanted Flash content. It can additionally block that M$ Flash-wannabe, Silverlight. Instead each individual Flash object will get a box with a little icon, click to load that individual Flash object.
This also reveals little hidden Flash objects you likely didn’t know were there. Since installing FlashBlock, I regularly notice a little “Flash detect” object. Could you be loading one that’s accessing your camera and microphone, are files (like perhaps viruses) being stored on your computer by one? Do you know what your Flash Global Settings are, have you already turned those functions off by default?
Also useful is the ultimate Flash E-stop, Flash Killer, that’ll get rid of all Flash content on a page. Want to stop a Flash object from doing something you don’t want happening, right now? Flash Killer gives you a button for that, replaces the area occupied by a video or game with a blank space.
With both on my system, I have a right-click option to remove individual objects, which works before I click on the object. After I click then the Flash takes over that space, right-click only yields the Flash menu, Flash Killer is the option.
Try FlashBlock. See how much faster Tips & Notes then loads.
I can highly recommend this very usefull add-on for firefox, I use it for fast screenshots:
“download youtube videos + 3.3.51”
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-Screenshot – Ever wanted to take a screenshot of an entire page (or just part) to archive or easily share with a friend or associate? The screenshot button has mutiple features to let you capture any page you are viewing at any time such as : Save complete page, save visible portion, save selection, save complete page as, save visible portion as, save selection as, copy complete page, copy visible portion, copy selection,, in .png or .jpg format with customizable key bindings.
—————————————————————————————–
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/download-youtube-videos/
I like ctrl enter in the address bar of my browser. Just type in wattsupwiththat and hit ctrl enter and it automatically adds the http://www. and the .com.
Smokey says:
August 21, 2011 at 1:21 pm
“Dave Springer, Tried it. Got 8 hits on “plaigiarizing mofo.”☺”
Hahaha – good one.
I usually take a partial sentence of 8 or 10 words that are unlikely to be arranged exactly the same way by different writers expressing the same information. If you get any hits on that you usually find it was a lot more than 8 or 10 words that were copied verbatim. There are programs that college professors use to detect plagiarism that don’t get fooled by changing a few words here and there but I figure most blog posters are too lazy to bother making enough changes to escape easy detection. I meam how many mofos like me would bother looking for plagiarizing mofos on a stupid blog in the first place? For me it’s just a way of figuring out if I’m talking to a genuinely knowledgable person or just a parrot.
Another sign of parrots is what a few of us in the intelligent design wars have termed the “literature bluff”.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=%22literature+bluff%22&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS290US290&ie=UTF-8
This is where some person like R.Gates throws out a list of links to peer reviewed literature to make a point without any actual quotes of what’s in said literature. The bluff is that he hasn’t actually read any of that literature himself, wouldn’t understand it if he tried, and relies on you not taking the time to sort through it to see if it actually supports his points or not.
I don’t bluff like that and will usually provide a quote or a reference to a figure or illustration within the paper. Usually the subject gets changed or the quote is just ignored. If someone else actually quotes from a paper I’ll go have a look at it if isn’t behind a paywall because another tactic dishonest parties is called “quote mining” where further reading around what’s quoted reveals that the author of the paper wasn’t really saying what the short quote appears to say i.e. it’s taken out of context.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=%228+or+10+words+that+are+unlikely+to+be+arranged+exactly+the+same%22
Anthropologists creep me out!! I like to study them, find out what makes them tick and write about their stupidity, and tell the world how astounded I am with them being astounded that some people lack a skill that they assume the
Lab-ratspeople they study should have.Thanks in principle.
In MSIE 8 that’s the “Find on this page” command in the pulldown beside in the “Live Search” box at top right of the header. (Do not click the magnifying glass, use the down arrow to get the pulldown menu. It finds the first occurrence and puts a Previous-Next dialogue at the top of page content. )
Very useful. Not magic, not the salvation of humanity, but does save time.
One problem is poor design of User Interface. MSIE 8 for example has more menu locations than necessary – for example, there is a Tools pull-down in the traditional top-left location and one in a new location on the right side a bit lower down. What mentality does things like that?
I assume everyone knows that in Firefox, control + (the plus sign without the shift) will increase the font size on a page and control – (the negative sign) will decrease the font size and sometimes the images as well. It becomes more useful the older you get.
Even Neolithic Larry knew about Apple-F. But I picked up some other good pointers here. Thanks.
Dave;
“plaigiarizing mofo” is a particularly good phrase to search for, because it includes a misspelling! Error-matching is very diagnostic.
😉
;p