Yesterday I posed a couple of related questions. The first was "What's the average weight of an Alaskan husky running in the Iditarod in 2010?"
This is pretty simple. The query [ Iditarod sled dog ] brings you quickly to the Wikipedia page, and the weight range of 45 - 66 pounds (20 - 25kg).
But the second question is a bit trickier. "Who actually handed the vaccine to the doctors in Nome in 1925?"
It's pretty well known that Leonard Seppala and his lead dog Togo were involved in delivering diptheria serum, but it turns out that Gunnar Kaasen was actually the last musher into Nome with the diptheria serum
How did I figure that out?
It's not hard to figure out from the query [ Iditarod history ] that Seppala was somehow involved in the race. (Just read any article about the Iditarod, and that will give you his name.)
But if you then read any of the many bios of Seppala on the web CAREFULLY (such as the Wikipedia entry), you'll find out that he actually wasn't the last guy in the chain of dog sled teams to Nome, but was the musher who went the longest distance through the most brutal weather. (Not that any of the trip was a milk run.)
So... The man who handed off the canister with the serum to the doctor in Nome was Gunnar Kaasen, who made the last leg of the journey with lead dog Balto. (Oddly enough, Balto was actually owned by Seppala!)
And... for extra credit, how much do you think HIS dogs weighed, on average?
It turns out that Kaasen's team was all Siberian Huskies. They weigh between 45-60 pounds--about the same as the Alaskan huskies.
The teaching point for this challenge is that it's often very easy to assume you know more than you really do. The Iditarod race celebrates Seppala's heroic mushing effort in 1925--but you shouldn't assume he was the hero who actually rode into Nome. Be careful, and although your mother always tells you this, it's really true: check your facts!
Friday, March 12, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Wednesday Search Challenge (March 10, 2010) -
As I mentioned, I spent last weekend in Anchorage, giving a talk at the Alaskan Librarians Association meeting. During that same weekend, the Iditarod dog sled race started from just down the street. And that gives us our challenge for today.
Quick: What's the average weight of an Alaskan husky running in the Iditarod in 2010?
As you probably know, the Iditarod dog sled race commemorates an amazing feat of outdoorsmanship--the transport of a 21 pound container of diptheria vaccine to Nome in order to quell a potentially lethal outbreak.
But if that first question was too easy for you, let's try a harder one.
Can you figure out who actually handed the vaccine to the doctors in Nome in 1925?
And... for extra credit, how much do you think HIS dogs weighed, on average?
Mush on!
Quick: What's the average weight of an Alaskan husky running in the Iditarod in 2010?
As you probably know, the Iditarod dog sled race commemorates an amazing feat of outdoorsmanship--the transport of a 21 pound container of diptheria vaccine to Nome in order to quell a potentially lethal outbreak.
But if that first question was too easy for you, let's try a harder one.
Can you figure out who actually handed the vaccine to the doctors in Nome in 1925?
And... for extra credit, how much do you think HIS dogs weighed, on average?
Mush on!
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
A few days in Anchorage at the Alaska Librarians conference: perceptions about search skills
As I mentioned yesterday, I spent a few days at the Alaskan Librarians conference (AKLA 2010). It's the annual gathering of the librarian tribe, and this time it coincided with the start of the Iditarod trans-Alaska sled dog race. (Tomorrow: A search challenge from the Iditarod!)
During the conference, I had the chance to talk with lots of librarians about what they see their patrons searching for (or not searching for), and what their particular challenges are.
One thing that came across clearly was that most people think of themselves as being pretty good searchers, but in fact, this seems to be a bit of an illusion. People's perception of the skill of searching (particularly their individual skill) is fairly positive. Many times you'll hear people express complete confidence: "I can find anything that's on the web!"
While that's great, it's also not quite true. For the most part, the search tasks that people tackle are reasonably straight-forward: What time is the movie at the megaplex tonight? What is the population of Japan? Why are Alaskan husky dogs in the Iditarod so small? (FWIW, they're much smaller than I'd expected!)
For these kinds of search tasks, the web has a large information base that's straightforward to locate.
But the really hard questions--the kinds we're interested in for our purposes--are a bit harder to answer.
I sat for a few hours at the University of Alaska library reference desk and observed as the reference librarian answered questions ranging from the simple ("Do you have a copy of 'The Great Gatsby'?") to the more difficult.
I find these sitting-at-the-reference-desk observations to be invaluable for my studies. While the range of reference questions you see at the desk is still broad, some of the harder questions are genuinely tough to answer, requiring the best skills of the professional researcher... and the educational knack of a skilled teacher.
One patron asked for a "ranked list of the top sociology journals in the world." That sounds as though it should be simple--but the hard bit here is defining what "top journal" means. The reference librarian did a masterful job of trying to elicit what the patron really wanted--does "top journal" mean by subscription volume? By citation counts? By number of appearances in the popular press? By number of issues published each year?
Any of those are possible to figure out, but to answer the patron's question (or by extension, their Google search) they need to understand what tradeoffs and choices are possible.
That's the function of the reference interview, to drill down into what the patron really REALLY wants, as opposed to what they say they want. As my clinical psychologist friends often say, "the presenting problem is rarely the real problem."
But knowing how to drill down and identify the shape and nature of information that actually will satisfy the patron's request requires broad knowledge about the world, about what resources are available and more than a bit of human psychology.
The patron who comes in to ask for "everything about the civil war" definitely requires a guiding hand to hone in on what would be a good answer. Now, if that patron has a British accent, the librarian might want to ask "which civil war do you mean??" since they could be asking about any of several different civil wars.
An expert searcher incorporates much of this skill into their own search strategy, asking themselves: What is it that I'm looking for anyway? What would a great answer be?
This kind of meta-cognition is, to my mind, the next great frontier for teaching people how to search effectively. It's hard to do and slippery to teach. That makes it a great challenge. More on this in times ahead.
Now... on towards Nome!!
During the conference, I had the chance to talk with lots of librarians about what they see their patrons searching for (or not searching for), and what their particular challenges are.
One thing that came across clearly was that most people think of themselves as being pretty good searchers, but in fact, this seems to be a bit of an illusion. People's perception of the skill of searching (particularly their individual skill) is fairly positive. Many times you'll hear people express complete confidence: "I can find anything that's on the web!"
While that's great, it's also not quite true. For the most part, the search tasks that people tackle are reasonably straight-forward: What time is the movie at the megaplex tonight? What is the population of Japan? Why are Alaskan husky dogs in the Iditarod so small? (FWIW, they're much smaller than I'd expected!)
For these kinds of search tasks, the web has a large information base that's straightforward to locate.
But the really hard questions--the kinds we're interested in for our purposes--are a bit harder to answer.
I sat for a few hours at the University of Alaska library reference desk and observed as the reference librarian answered questions ranging from the simple ("Do you have a copy of 'The Great Gatsby'?") to the more difficult.
U. Alaska Anchorage: Great Room at the library
I find these sitting-at-the-reference-desk observations to be invaluable for my studies. While the range of reference questions you see at the desk is still broad, some of the harder questions are genuinely tough to answer, requiring the best skills of the professional researcher... and the educational knack of a skilled teacher.
One patron asked for a "ranked list of the top sociology journals in the world." That sounds as though it should be simple--but the hard bit here is defining what "top journal" means. The reference librarian did a masterful job of trying to elicit what the patron really wanted--does "top journal" mean by subscription volume? By citation counts? By number of appearances in the popular press? By number of issues published each year?
Any of those are possible to figure out, but to answer the patron's question (or by extension, their Google search) they need to understand what tradeoffs and choices are possible.
That's the function of the reference interview, to drill down into what the patron really REALLY wants, as opposed to what they say they want. As my clinical psychologist friends often say, "the presenting problem is rarely the real problem."
But knowing how to drill down and identify the shape and nature of information that actually will satisfy the patron's request requires broad knowledge about the world, about what resources are available and more than a bit of human psychology.
The patron who comes in to ask for "everything about the civil war" definitely requires a guiding hand to hone in on what would be a good answer. Now, if that patron has a British accent, the librarian might want to ask "which civil war do you mean??" since they could be asking about any of several different civil wars.
An expert searcher incorporates much of this skill into their own search strategy, asking themselves: What is it that I'm looking for anyway? What would a great answer be?
This kind of meta-cognition is, to my mind, the next great frontier for teaching people how to search effectively. It's hard to do and slippery to teach. That makes it a great challenge. More on this in times ahead.
Now... on towards Nome!!
Monday, March 8, 2010
A quick note about Google Books
For the past few days I've been in Anchorage, Alaska attending the 50th annual Alaskan Librarians Association meeting. (More on that tomorrow...)
In the process, I taught a tutorial on Intermediate Google Web Search skills (click on that link to see what I talked about). And in the process I showed a bit about Google Books.
In particular, I highlighted a couple of neat, somewhat unknown features of Google Books.
I was even MORE surprised when I found out that few of them used Google Books. It's not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't see why they would ever want to use Books. A quick demonstration fixed that problem.
Surprisingly, only one or two librarians out of the 400 there knew about the "Find in a library" link to WorldCat. (Just out of curiosity, did you?)
My Books demo was to:
(1) show them the WorldCat link ("Find this book in a library"),
(2) illustrate how to search for the text of a passage in a book,
(3) then how to locate archival books about topics of local interest (primarily Alaska state history;
example: find old books that mention the Chilkoot trail),
(4) how to use the shelf feature in Books,
(5) how to search the magazines collection in Books.
While all of these features are wonderful, if you're a teacher on Kodiak Island trying to get a back issue of Life magazine, it can be quite a wait for the interlibrary loan to get the back issue to you. But on Books, that's a 10 second operation--Example: search for magazines in the collection that mention Alaska statehood.
And the "Find in a library" link is incredibly useful if you're looking for a book that's (physically) nearby.
Now you know the secret of finding a book via Google Books. It's handy on Kodiak, and it's handy where you live. (And it's REALLY handy when you're looking for a super-rare book too.)
In the process, I taught a tutorial on Intermediate Google Web Search skills (click on that link to see what I talked about). And in the process I showed a bit about Google Books.
In particular, I highlighted a couple of neat, somewhat unknown features of Google Books.
I was even MORE surprised when I found out that few of them used Google Books. It's not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't see why they would ever want to use Books. A quick demonstration fixed that problem.
Surprisingly, only one or two librarians out of the 400 there knew about the "Find in a library" link to WorldCat. (Just out of curiosity, did you?)
My Books demo was to:
(1) show them the WorldCat link ("Find this book in a library"),
(2) illustrate how to search for the text of a passage in a book,
(3) then how to locate archival books about topics of local interest (primarily Alaska state history;
example: find old books that mention the Chilkoot trail),
(4) how to use the shelf feature in Books,
(5) how to search the magazines collection in Books.
While all of these features are wonderful, if you're a teacher on Kodiak Island trying to get a back issue of Life magazine, it can be quite a wait for the interlibrary loan to get the back issue to you. But on Books, that's a 10 second operation--Example: search for magazines in the collection that mention Alaska statehood.
And the "Find in a library" link is incredibly useful if you're looking for a book that's (physically) nearby.
I did a search for books by Erin Mckean and found "Verbatim" (a wonderful book). Now, to find it in a local library, I click on "Find in a library."
Ah. This is what you see if you're in the town of Kodiak on Kodiak Island, a smallish fishing village without an extensive collection. You can see I entered the zip code for Kodiak in the "Enter your location" box. But now you know where to look.
As it happens, I actually live in Palo Alto, California, not so far from Stanford University.
When I put in THAT zip code, I can see that there are several copies within easy biking distance of home.
Now you know the secret of finding a book via Google Books. It's handy on Kodiak, and it's handy where you live. (And it's REALLY handy when you're looking for a super-rare book too.)
Friday, March 5, 2010
Answer: Finding an insect
When she asked this question, I felt very much like a reference librarian who's asked to identify an insect that a young patron has brought in.
With a question this open-ended, and since the insect in question wasn't around, the only approach that would make sense is to look for images of the bug.
Note that in a case like this, doing a regular Google Web search for [ california insect brown stripes on abdomen slow-moving ] just isn't a high probability search. There are LOTS of insects like this.
But more importantly, would she be able to identify the right insect given a textual description? Probably not. She wasn't an entomologist (if she were, I would use a totally different approach).
Instead, I was hoping that the insect was big, slow-moving and obvious--and so I bet that someone had taken a picture of such a bug and had posted it on the web.
So I turned to Google Image search and did the simplest possible query that I thought might work:
[ California insect ]
I know that's too open-ended, but I was hoping.
But no luck.
So THEN I tried filtering on the color brown. Did you know you can filter images by dominant color?
Here's how to filter image search by color:
See the "Show options..." button on the last line of the screenshot?
If you click on that, you'll open up the "Options panel" and it'll look like this:
With a question this open-ended, and since the insect in question wasn't around, the only approach that would make sense is to look for images of the bug.
Note that in a case like this, doing a regular Google Web search for [ california insect brown stripes on abdomen slow-moving ] just isn't a high probability search. There are LOTS of insects like this.
But more importantly, would she be able to identify the right insect given a textual description? Probably not. She wasn't an entomologist (if she were, I would use a totally different approach).
Instead, I was hoping that the insect was big, slow-moving and obvious--and so I bet that someone had taken a picture of such a bug and had posted it on the web.
So I turned to Google Image search and did the simplest possible query that I thought might work:
[ California insect ]
I know that's too open-ended, but I was hoping.
But no luck.
So THEN I tried filtering on the color brown. Did you know you can filter images by dominant color?
Here's how to filter image search by color:
If you click on that, you'll open up the "Options panel" and it'll look like this:
This gives you a whole slate of new options / new ways to filter the hits you're getting back from Image search.
Since she said it was a brown insect, I thought I'd try filtering on the color brown.
I didn't KNOW that this would work, but it only takes a couple of seconds, and I thought MAYBE it would be a common enough insect to show up in the first page or two.
Success!! The big, ugly, brown insect with stripes on the abdomen showed up in the lower right corner of the first page.
The bug is a Jersualem cricket, a large, flightless cricket common in California. (see: Stenoplematus fuscus, http://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?identification=Dark-Jerusalem-Cricket for more details).
Bottom line: A good tactic when looking for common things is to just try doing the obvious search (in this case, on images, since any textual description is likely to be confusing, and confirmation is much easier by sight), then applying filters to get to the details of what you want to see.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Wednesday Search Challenge (March 3, 2010) - Identifying an insect
This is a true story.
During one of my search-education classes for K12 teachers, I was asked if I could "search for this big brown bug I found in my back yard last week."
I was dubious that this would be easy to search for--insect identification is well-known to be hard under the best of circumstances, and I wasn't at all sure I would be able to find the particular bug she was talking about.
But what the heck... let's give it a try.
"Tell me a little more about the bug," I said. "How big was it? What color was it? Anything else to go on?"
It turned out that the insect was pretty big, very ugly, slow-moving and brown with dark stripes on the abdomen.
With just that amount of information, I was able to do 2 searches and find the answer. She confirmed that this was in fact the bug she'd seen.
Now... Can YOU figure out what this bug might have been?
A big hint: The thing that confirmed it for us was the presence of stripes on the abdomen.
Give it a try. Come back tomorrow for the answer!
During one of my search-education classes for K12 teachers, I was asked if I could "search for this big brown bug I found in my back yard last week."
I was dubious that this would be easy to search for--insect identification is well-known to be hard under the best of circumstances, and I wasn't at all sure I would be able to find the particular bug she was talking about.
But what the heck... let's give it a try.
"Tell me a little more about the bug," I said. "How big was it? What color was it? Anything else to go on?"
It turned out that the insect was pretty big, very ugly, slow-moving and brown with dark stripes on the abdomen.
With just that amount of information, I was able to do 2 searches and find the answer. She confirmed that this was in fact the bug she'd seen.
Now... Can YOU figure out what this bug might have been?
A big hint: The thing that confirmed it for us was the presence of stripes on the abdomen.
Give it a try. Come back tomorrow for the answer!
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
What a graphic can tell you
A while ago I used to co-post in Kathy Sierra's blog "Creating Passionate Users." I wrote a post there that I've copied over to my blog because I wanted to be able to refer back to it (and I don't know if the archive edition of CPU will hang around forever). (Link to original post on "What a graphic can tell you.")
So I'm copied my original post here... and also wanted to make the point that I'll ALSO be talking about various sensemaking and information visualization topics in this blog as well.
________________________________
I love looking at things in a new way. More to the point, I love it when I see things about the world that I thought I knew... but then realize there's more to the story.
And for the past few years I've been doing various pieces of research into information visualization--the science and art of making complex information visually perceivable. It's cool, it's fun, and every so often you learn something really, really interesting.
I was just sort of doodling the other day in Powerpoint. (If you must know, I was trying to prepare a talk to give at some university, and I started wondering how many dots you could usefully squeeze onto a Powerpoint slide.)
Now that sounds crazy: doodling in Powerpoint? Yeah, I know. But come to think of it, why not? It's got a bunch of okay tools for drawing and while you probably won't make great art, it's fine for quick sketching. You won't confuse the output with a masterwork in oil or water color, but it's really great for a quick sketch. And it IS the tool I spend a lot of time using, so I've grown pretty accustomed to its idiosyncracies.
So I drew a bunch of dots. Then it hit me--if a dot stood for a day, what would my life look like as a set of dots on the screen?
(You can click on each image to see it full-size.)
If that's 20 years worth of days, then what would the rest of my life look like? Could I fit a lifetime's worth of days onto a Powerpoint slide?
![]()
And how would you think of your life in terms of segments? I fooled around some more and came up with this as a way of thinking about the various parts of my career.
I certainly hope that my life and career last more than 60 years! Nevertheless, I found this an intriguing way of looking at the progress of your life.
Or, to put it more pragmatically, where's your dot?
Question for you: What information graphic was most informative / influential / insightful for you? Was there a great piece of infoviz that really just did it for you?
So I'm copied my original post here... and also wanted to make the point that I'll ALSO be talking about various sensemaking and information visualization topics in this blog as well.
________________________________
I love looking at things in a new way. More to the point, I love it when I see things about the world that I thought I knew... but then realize there's more to the story.
And for the past few years I've been doing various pieces of research into information visualization--the science and art of making complex information visually perceivable. It's cool, it's fun, and every so often you learn something really, really interesting.
I was just sort of doodling the other day in Powerpoint. (If you must know, I was trying to prepare a talk to give at some university, and I started wondering how many dots you could usefully squeeze onto a Powerpoint slide.)
Now that sounds crazy: doodling in Powerpoint? Yeah, I know. But come to think of it, why not? It's got a bunch of okay tools for drawing and while you probably won't make great art, it's fine for quick sketching. You won't confuse the output with a masterwork in oil or water color, but it's really great for a quick sketch. And it IS the tool I spend a lot of time using, so I've grown pretty accustomed to its idiosyncracies.
So I drew a bunch of dots. Then it hit me--if a dot stood for a day, what would my life look like as a set of dots on the screen?
(You can click on each image to see it full-size.)
If that's 20 years worth of days, then what would the rest of my life look like? Could I fit a lifetime's worth of days onto a Powerpoint slide?
And how would you think of your life in terms of segments? I fooled around some more and came up with this as a way of thinking about the various parts of my career.
I certainly hope that my life and career last more than 60 years! Nevertheless, I found this an intriguing way of looking at the progress of your life.
Or, to put it more pragmatically, where's your dot?
Question for you: What information graphic was most informative / influential / insightful for you? Was there a great piece of infoviz that really just did it for you?
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Answer: Only mollusk to walk on two legs?
The answer, much to my great surprise, is the octopus!
Here's how I found it.
I knew that the search terms "two legs" and "walking" would be pretty common. I can easily believe there are millions of pages with "two legs" somewhere on them, and that doing a search for [ mollusk walking two legs ] would just be hopeless.
But I figured that the people most likely to write about this kind of amazing phenomenon in the natural world are probably science writers. Thing about it: a mollusk that walks on two legs--it's not going to make the front page of the paper, but it would probably make the science page or an article in a nature magazine of some kind.
So my first (and only) query was [ bipedal walking mollusk ]
Sure enough, the first result is to a science media news report from UC Berkeley. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03/24_octopus.shtml
I was also encouraged when I noticed that there were several other hits on the page that mentioned octopus in the same snippet with walking.
The details: I put bipedal first in the query because I wanted the search terms walking and mollusk to be next to each other.
Why did I do that? Is it important that walking and mollusk be adjacent and in that order?
Well.. yes! Most people don't know that word order DOES sometimes matter in web searches. In this case, I was thinking that an article (in a science magazine or a university press report) would probably say something like:
Blah blah blah walking mollusk blah blah blah...
In other words, I was trying to anticipate what I thought someone else would have written about our mysterious walking mollusk.
You can try it yourself. Try [ walking bipedal mollusk ], and the results aren't nearly as good.
By contrast, when I wanted to find a YouTube video of the two-legged walking octopus, I did NOT use the term bipedal because I don't expect YouTube descriptions to use such a technical term. Instead, I just went to Google and did a query for [ YouTube octopus walking ] and that got me just what I needed.
Key takeaway: When you're searching for something slightly obscure, try putting yourself into the mindset of someone who would be writing about the thing you're searching for. What would they write? Then, choose the key terms from that, and use those terms as your initial search.
Search on!
Here's how I found it.
I knew that the search terms "two legs" and "walking" would be pretty common. I can easily believe there are millions of pages with "two legs" somewhere on them, and that doing a search for [ mollusk walking two legs ] would just be hopeless.
But I figured that the people most likely to write about this kind of amazing phenomenon in the natural world are probably science writers. Thing about it: a mollusk that walks on two legs--it's not going to make the front page of the paper, but it would probably make the science page or an article in a nature magazine of some kind.
So my first (and only) query was [ bipedal walking mollusk ]
Sure enough, the first result is to a science media news report from UC Berkeley. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03/24_octopus.shtml
I was also encouraged when I noticed that there were several other hits on the page that mentioned octopus in the same snippet with walking.
The details: I put bipedal first in the query because I wanted the search terms walking and mollusk to be next to each other.
Why did I do that? Is it important that walking and mollusk be adjacent and in that order?
Well.. yes! Most people don't know that word order DOES sometimes matter in web searches. In this case, I was thinking that an article (in a science magazine or a university press report) would probably say something like:
Blah blah blah walking mollusk blah blah blah...
In other words, I was trying to anticipate what I thought someone else would have written about our mysterious walking mollusk.
You can try it yourself. Try [ walking bipedal mollusk ], and the results aren't nearly as good.
By contrast, when I wanted to find a YouTube video of the two-legged walking octopus, I did NOT use the term bipedal because I don't expect YouTube descriptions to use such a technical term. Instead, I just went to Google and did a query for [ YouTube octopus walking ] and that got me just what I needed.
Key takeaway: When you're searching for something slightly obscure, try putting yourself into the mindset of someone who would be writing about the thing you're searching for. What would they write? Then, choose the key terms from that, and use those terms as your initial search.
Search on!
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Wednesday Search Challenge (Feb 24, 2010) - Searching for a mollusk
Time for a relatively straight-forward question and a comment.
The search challenge for today is:
What is the only mollusk known that can walk on two legs?
When you answer this question, take note of how long it takes you from the moment you start trying to solve the question until the time you get the answer. We call that amount of time the "Time To Result" -- and it's one way of measuring how effective you are as a searcher.
When I solved this challenge, it took me about 5 seconds. How could I do it so fast? It's mostly by practice and noticing how people write web pages. When I think about what to search for, I first think about how people would write about the topic.
But more on this tomorrow, when I reveal the answer!
The search challenge for today is:
What is the only mollusk known that can walk on two legs?
When you answer this question, take note of how long it takes you from the moment you start trying to solve the question until the time you get the answer. We call that amount of time the "Time To Result" -- and it's one way of measuring how effective you are as a searcher.
When I solved this challenge, it took me about 5 seconds. How could I do it so fast? It's mostly by practice and noticing how people write web pages. When I think about what to search for, I first think about how people would write about the topic.
But more on this tomorrow, when I reveal the answer!
Monday, February 22, 2010
Why Control-F is the single most important thing you can teach someone about search
One of the biggest surprises of my research life was when I discovered that LOTS of people don't know about Control-F. Here's the story...
I was doing a field interview with a schoolbus trainer. She was doing her searches just fine, moving right along, when she was suddenly stymied by a fairly simple search problem. She was looking for a particular section of the California Vehicle Code and found a fairly long page that clearly should have held the information, but it just didn't seem to be there.
After about 5 minutes of fruitlessly scrolling up and down the document, I asked "What are you looking for?" Her rather grimaced reply was "I'M SEARCHING FOR THE CODE..."
It took me a while to realize that she was visually searching the entire lengthy document, line-by-line, to find the code.
It was clear that she didn't know how to use the web browser's built-in "Find" function. I was surprised because I'd thought that this was universal knowledge. How could you browse the web daily, as she does, and NOT know about Control-F (or Command-F for Mac users)?
Since then, I've done a fairly extensive survey of US internet users, and the answer still shocks me.
90% of American internet users do NOT know how to use Control-F (or equivalent) to find a given string on a page. (Sample size so far: 2,512.)
Among school teachers, the average isn't much better--it's currently running at 50%.
When I teach my internet search classes, I always ask, and I'm always surprised. I just taught a class of twelve K12 teachers, and only one person actually knew how to find a word on the page.
If YOU don't know, here's the best tip I can give you to improve your search skills:
Control-F, or Command-F, lets you look for a string somewhere on the page. This works in all browsers, and nearly every piece of software (e.g., Acrobat, Powerpoint, Word, Excel...) It usually pops up a "find" box somewhere on the application that lets you type in exactly what you'd like to find, and then
If you only learn one keyboard shortcut in your entire life, this should be it. Knowing how to rapidly spot the word, phrase or substring you're looking for quickly will change the way you read texts online.
It will change the way you read. But more about that later...
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