A Google Researcher Reveals 4 Crucial Things "Average Users" Should Know But Don't

Dan Russell, a Google employee, works on quantifying how people search and research things for Google.  In his role, Russell tries to figure out what people do and do not understand about search and, by extension, their computers.

Here are a few of his points via this Fast Company piece.  

• Among U.S. K-12 teacher (Control+F knowledge) is around 50%, with huge variations by school district and location. As you'd guess, tech-savvy schools (districts) do reasonably well. But most of the U.S. is not tech-savvy. I've seen many cases where the lack of the ability to find a text on the web page leads to all kinds of scholastic hilarity.
• People often don't take advantage of the tabs and windows browser operations in ways that would help them. Although you might know how to open a link in a new tab, most people don't. Likewise, moving a tab out of the window (useful when you have a second monitor) or re-arranging tabs to reflect the organization of your work... just not widely done, even though these correspond naturally to physical actions on a real desktop.
• We know that people often have rather wide screens and suffer reading disruptions as a side effect of trying to read lines that are 10 inches wide (that is, between 20-50 words wide). While most people feel that's uncomfortable, what they don't realize is that they can easily resize the window to make the (word) wrapping much better for them.