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Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F
Hugh Pickens writes "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.'"
Everybody here is focusing keyboard commands, but that isn't the main problem. People would be almost as well served by using the "Edit... Find" GUI menu option, but don't even know about that. It's the concept of searching within the current page they need, more than the finger habits to do it a bit faster.
I worked at a newspaper and would see journalists and editors doing things like searching for words completely manually. I would say, "hey I have a very quick tip for you that will save you hours every single day for the rest of your career. In fact, it'll save much, much more time TODAY than it takes to teach it to you." and they would say "I don't have time!!! I have too much work to do!!!." Often I would just jump in and show someone how to do it, doing search and replaces in less than 10 seconds that would take them well over 30 minutes. That impressed a few people enough for them to start using it. But I found that many of them would persist in doing it manually anyway because it was just "easier." So what I discovered is that there are a lot of people who will work their fingers to the bone, unnecessarily spend hours working instead of enjoying life (these people were all salaried), even injure themselves with repetitive stress disorder, osteoarthritis, and so forth, to save the slightest mental effort involved in learning something very slightly new.