Most likely, you already know it, but Ctrl+F is a popular keyboard shortcut that is used to search for a specific word or phrase within the text. For example, in a document or a website.
It is a helpful tool for quickly highlighting specific information within long and complex texts. It can save you much time and effort compared to manually scanning a website or document to find what you are looking for.
Now let’s check the current pros and cons.
Why we love Ctrl+F?
- Simple and easy to use.
- Predictable, reliable. It works as expected, and the accuracy is 100%. It is not there if there are no search results for the word you are looking for.
- It shows the results from the first character typed. Even if this seems minor, it is not because users avoid missing results.
- It is blazing fast.
- Private. Everything runs inside your browser. Unfortunately, in the Cloud world, never take this for granted.
Some of the limitations of Ctrl+F
- You cannot search multiple terms at the same time. You will need to conduct separate searches for each one.
- Exact string matching, if the characters don’t match, the term is not highlighted. Sometimes, you can fine-tune some options, such as a case or diacritics matching. However, it is easy to miss significant results.
- You cannot search by concept or semantics. You cannot query the text with questions.
- Hard to search for more than one word. The more words you type, the more likely you will get no results. A similar phrase or passage might be within the text, but terms might be linked using different conjunctions, words might use another declension, tense, etc. Sometimes, searching for a single word might return many highlights, increasing the time required to review the results.
- It doesn’t remember your queries. If you try finding the same information the next day, you must type your query again.
ReadLayer is a browser extension to augment Ctrl+F by keeping what works and addressing these limitations. Currently, it works on the web and in PDFs. Check it out and let us know what you think!
P.S. Why Ctrl+F does not have its own Wikipedia page? It definitely deserves this space.
