I have a party trick … searching. I tell people that I can find almost anyone on the internet with very little information. They tell me no way, and I prove it by googling things like their email address and phone number, common pieces of information. They all get amazed. 🙂
I have always know that I am good at search, that’s one of the reasons I do what I do. I get search engines and love to try to figure out what people are thinking and needing. My mom and even coworkers will come to me and ask me to search for things. To teach them how to search. But even they know what Google is.
A recent study just said that 24% of the population fail at doing a Google Search. Yes — a quarter of the population. Some say they want to use Google because that is the term for search engine today. Think Kleenex. In fact they just type in the search to their address bar and get MSN or Yahoo.
This doesn’t surprise me because of the Google brand name issue, and the fact that most people don’t know how to change the settings on their browsers. I sometimes forget that I am happy in my little world and assume that everyone else is like me. Then I reads something like this and get ripped back into the real world. We have a far way to go before search engines can be used fully. It’s no one’s fault, its a common learning curve. We’ll get there.
Until that day I will help people find stuff, be the travel agent, and fix the computer every once in a while. Small price to pay for education and a world of better information.
