Google Is Your Friend. Use It.

[Stang02GT]

“Google Is Your Friend. Use it.”


Yes that is correct, Google is your friend. And it’s a good one. Always there when you need it, ready and willing at all hours of the day to help you out. Some of you might have found this site(Bytes.com) from our good old buddy.

But I have been noticing a trend lately. Our good friend is being neglected. More and more everyday I see people posting questions around the site that with a quick search could be answered.


No offence to the person who started this thread, but his/her post is what pushed me to write this.

how big is the average monthly income of a Software Developer in

• USA
• Germany
• Sweden
• Norway

?

How on earth are any of us supposed to answer a question like that? The answer is simple we can’t answer it with just our own knowledge. I have no idea what the average salary in Norway is! Or even the US for that matter!

Most of you will see this post, pull up Google and do a couple quick searches come back to the thread and post your findings. I used to do this but I have since stopped. And I’m asking you to stop as well.

Now your probably saying “Well wait one minute here! This is an on-line community where we are supposed to help one another!”

And yes you are correct 110%! We are helping people by not answering these types of questions. That may sound strange but think about it like this…

So you did the all the research, you come back and post your findings. You have done two things here.
1. Wasted your time.
2. Shown this person they can continue to post questions like this because you’ll do all the work for them.

I’m not saying we have to be mean and nasty but there are questions like these that we can say “Hey wait a minute, this is something you can find out on your own.” In the end we are helping these people achieve more then just an answer to a question. We are helping them realize they can be self reliant.

So please don’t take this message the wrong way and stop answering peoples questions. Use your best judgment and when you feel a question comes up that a person can find the answer to themselves, give them a little nudge and guidance to help them find their answer.

[sanity]

I read your post and felt that I must register in order to reply to your logic. Ok, I see a fair point that it gets beyond a joke to some extent when answering questions that are so uncommon or unknown that they really need to do some research, however ... consider this, If everyone answered common questions with "Google Is Your Friend.." guess what google indexes as the answer to all these common questions? "Google is your friend."

Now I am no spring chicken, and do always carry out some research before posting a question, but I am finding more and more common questions are being answered with "Try Googling." This is ironic as the forums that are getting the most ranking, ie. the forums most often updated, are the ones that appear in the top of Google's own index. Maybe Google should start looking at the content "Google Is Your Friend" and decrease the ranking accordingly to ward of would-be researchers?

Sanity