How Do You Search Within Text?

ZTE Research · April 10, 2018 3:18PM

The Consumer Lab team would like to learn about your mobile phone usage when it comes to searching text on your device.

An example would be reading an article online and selecting a word that you would like to know the definition of.

Please
1) Select one of the options below according to your usage of text search.
2) Reply with the scenarios that you use and any pain points you have when searching through text.

Citing multiple scenarios would be appreciated and screenshots are always a plus.

14blank40 · April 10, 2018 5:32PM

I voted for long press, as it makes things quicker. All you have to do is long press on the word and swipe up and most of the time, the definition is there. If that doesn't work for some reason, then I may paste the text into a search box.

dnewman007 · April 10, 2018 5:52PM

Typically I just paste into the search bar.

schwartzasher · April 10, 2018 8:05PM

Usually I manually type stuff in but if I'm doing web stuff I just press and hold and press search

samsamha · April 10, 2018 8:05PM

i normally will copy and paste into chrome. though i can see the benefit of able to long press, highlight and translate/define without the need to copy. However, I don't want to bug down the phone or have random behavior since long press to highlight for copy and paste has been a pretty standard behavior. I don't do a lot of seraches so it is possible that even if the feature is there, I may not want to set it as default setting.

wiseman13 · April 10, 2018 8:22PM

I love long press myself and I often highlight and long press the home button to have Google assistant weigh in so it is a familiar action.

mobilegeezer · April 10, 2018 8:39PM

I checked manually, but it's really about 50-50 between that and pasting text into the box.

DoppelgangerD · April 10, 2018 9:01PM

LONG PRESS TEXT would be ideal.
I wish such a feature existed on all devices. It would sure make life a lot easier.

coldheat06 · April 10, 2018 9:03PM

I long press the word cause it us similar to whsst I do on my Windows pc (right click a word to search for it)

frodriguez2010 · April 10, 2018 11:33PM

used to my choice once in a while i'll deviate.

jasone · April 11, 2018 12:08AM

I chose long press but honestly this is something I so rarely do.

TEXASMADE1978 · April 11, 2018 8:53AM

I use long press about 75% of the time and I manually type the text into my search box about 25%.

hollap · April 11, 2018 1:16PM

I enter text into the search bar. Just by habit. I don't need to do this very often, so I don't really care either way.

saeedted · April 11, 2018 4:08PM

I use long press to search the definition of a word or the phone number oor addreess if I am long-pressing a location. Another thing I do is to call up the Google Assistant to define a word.

runtohell121 · April 11, 2018 9:58PM

I usually search manually using a search box unless I know I will long press to select the word correctly... and then a pop-up menu with web search occurs.

cyberdyne · April 11, 2018 10:53PM

Neither on of these answers fit my use. When I am inputting text on a mobile I use speech for search. When I am translating Japanese, Korean or Chinese, I paste directly into a translate box. Long press directly to translation is fine but it's the only time I am search from text. When it's English I want to rephrase the search and not just search from text

cavanaughtim · April 12, 2018 1:09PM

This poll doesn't seem to be so much about searching within text (e.g., using the browser's "find in page" function), but doing a web-search of something that's already written on the page. In those cases, if it's a single word I generally just use long press. If it's multiple words, I would just retype it into the search bar. Only as a last resort would I ever use copy/paste for multiple words, because I absolutely hate moving the bounding handles.

ironbaybeedoll · April 13, 2018 2:10AM

What, I don't know everything? I still copy and paste into google search directly out of habit. Sometimes changing habit makes things slower than speeding things up.