An article over at the Atlantic tells of a study by google, with a large sample, that shows that 90% of people don’t know how to search a page or document for a word.

“90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands,” [Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google] said. “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. 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!'”

I can’t believe people have been wasting their lives like this either! It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy. 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.

It’s crazy at first, but then, lets think about this: where is the “find” command kept? Yes, it’s CTRL+F (or COMMAND+F) but if you don’t know the shortcut key, where do you find it?

It’s under the “Edit” menu! Sure, this makes sense in a text editor when I want to “find and replace” something. But, in that same text editor when I’m just looking for a certain section, or when I’m looking for a phrase on a web page, am I editing? No. It’s a prime example of bad UI design, hiding one of the most useful functions around in a illogical menu. And why? At this point: because it’s always been there. In the beginning, because it’s where it was in word processors.

It’s time we move the find command out of edit, and make it easy to…well…find.