Read this fascinating insight by Dan Russell a 'search anthropologist' at Google who says:
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 probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.
90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell 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 had to do a quick and very dirty calculation on how much could be saved by some very basic training in a large company.
Extend this cost to searching for people and the 'time to search' value dramatically changes the saving. The value of reducing the cost of search for people in large organisations is nearly always underestimated and undervalued.
I wrote about this a few years ago - "Searching to find the one'.
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