I’ve always been a “lurker” on all platforms and communities because when I do have a question or would like to contribute my first thought has become:
Actually, let me google it first
In which case I’ll usually have some answer. Usually it isn’t a complete answer but enough for me to not want to share my question anymore.
Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.
I’ve been in situations where someone on the table asks a question nobody knows the answer to and the conversation just dies then and there. For example, someone might say: “…and then I saw wallaby from my hotel window, so I started wondering if they would eat those nice flowers I saw the day before”. Well, nobody on the table knows what wallabies eat, so nobody said anything and the conversation just died.
Instead of anyone saying “let me google that”, there’s a long silence and then someone just takes the conversation in a completely different direction by saying something like: “oh, BTW I’ve been thinking of getting a new car and that’s when…”
Is it possible they eat cars and that was part of their answer?
Well, the Australian wildlife is known for being “out there to get you”, so I wouldn’t rule it out. Sticking to the spirit of the conversation, I’m definitely not going to check any facts related to wallabies.
If every time a person has a question, it has to be re-answered, it’s vastly less efficient than having it be answered once and then have people just Google for it. When I answer a question, I want it to benefit not just one random person but all the future people who can find it via searching.
I understand the people who object to people being rude about it, but not with the people saying that they should not be expected to at least search – a small expenditure of their time – before asking other people to spend their time fixing the first person’s problem.
It takes you seconds to hit Google. If you broadcast that question to a forum, maybe thousands or tens of thousands or even millions of people read your question. Then they donate their time to try to solve your issue, and multiple people may spend time on it. It almost certainly takes more time per individual to craft a good answer than it takes the asker to perform a search. That is asking for a big chunk of time from people who are trying to donate their time to help others. Their time is much more limited than Google search cycles.
Common courtesy is to search first. If that doesn’t solve it, then ask.
It depends. I get your point but there are a lot of questions to which answers change over time and a restatement of the question can lead to a discussion about new and better ways to answer them. Plus if I’m new to something I often simply ask the wrong question. Something a knowledgable human recognizes, but google does not. So a better answer to basic questions often is ‘google this not that’ making it way easier for the new person to find the answers.
You’re making the assumption that everyone is capable of using Google to the extent needed to find an answer. Being able to fully utilize and understand exactly what it is you’re searching for is a skill in and of itself and not everyone knows how or what to search for. Of course this is dependent on the question/issue but I still think that too many people take for granted that Google-Fu is an actual skill that some can lack
If plugging the text of the question that you’re asking into the Google Search bar turns up pages with the answer, then that isn’t the situation. And that’s generally what I think people get upset about.
There’s also the benefit of discussion. You can find perspective on information which is arguably just as valuable as the information itself. Wisdom isn’t just knowing the facts but understanding them in practice and in proximity to other facts.
In a similar vein have ever ready portal to all of human knowledge constantly in our pocket it has killed some avenue of debate in face to face social situations, like out at a bar. In the before time you could spend an entire evening debating which came first or who wrote some film, or which song sold most albums and the argument would not be settled by some whipping out a phone, googling and done.
I kinda get where you’re coming from, but at the same time, I think there are just as many people these days coming up with absolute rubbish which too many people have the misfortune of falling for.
And as much as we would like to believe that we can search up facts about any topic in the world, there is just so much rubbish on the internet that even when you do look it up, the search results are far from helpful (depending on what you’re looking for).
Personally I like asking people stuff that I could have looked up, just to hear their take on it.
yeah, I think that almost builds on my post not contradicts it. Someone may whip out a phone, go to the first result in google and say “there proves my point” without assessing the validity of the source.
Plus it’s not even that useful of a statement in this day and age. Google isn’t what it used to be, and even if it was, a lot of time it struggled with very specific and detailed problems. It would often just point you to the community where you were told to “google it”
yep, SEO has ruined google search. Now a days a lot of people add “reddit” to the search term because its more efective, only issue is when the subreddit is closed and internet archive only has one snapshot that was the moment the thread was created and no answers are there haha.
Tangential but I’m curious, when was it that you noticed every search engine was broken by SEO? I started to see signs 6 years ago, but they became undeniably unusable about 3 years ago for me.
There was a guy on Reddit (remember that place?) recently who used an acronym in a post and then refused to explain it, kept saying “just Google it” but it was stupid because no-one could Google it and get the result that he was meaning. And the results varied depending on where you were in the world, I think I got a football team in France, other people were getting organisations in Mexico, etc. He never did explain it. Such a douche.
God, that’s the type of thing they do on DRCJ
Grrrrrrrr
Sorry, not familiar. Is that the Greater Rotherham Railway Racing Reenactment Register?
😐
I always try to answer even though I know the answer is on Google.
Either because it may be a more up-to-date version or because you simply never know when other websites will stop being available and therefore that source of information will be lost. Also because many times no matter how hard one searches before asking, sometimes we do not know the concepts we want to reach and our search is limited.
Imagine if everyone responded with “Just Google It”, we would never find an answer to anything.
I really hate that mantra and it should be part of “If you don’t have anything to contribute, don’t comment.”
this is how it should be dealt with!
thank you 🧡
The worst outcome is when the first google result is a thread that only has an answer of “just google it”
When that happens, I register on whatever forum it was where someone said that just to say (necropost if needed) that I had the same question, searched it, and the search results brought me here where an asshole is saying to search it.
At which point you get yelled at for reviving a dead thread
At my work we usually debate ad nauseam until one, both, or all of us suddenly remember that we have all the wealth of mankind’s knowledge at our finger tips and then we Google.
…then we inevitably complain about the lack of internet in our office, agree to disagree and then forget what we were discussing as we move onto another debatable topic.
I came out of lurking because you took the words out of my mouth. You have technical leads saying the words “best practice”, yet when you ask for a documented reference, suddenly there’s no time to go into the detail and we move on to the next issue resolving nothing.
The worst is when you KNOW something is the best practice, but no one bothered to write it down
I would like a hard rule that there’s no stupid question. If you don’t want to help someone, just ignore it.
No need to add a negative comment town discussion.
I feel “just fucking google it” culture is toxic and driver away new users on a lot of discussion boards.
Dumb questions that could be easily answered with a search engine or AI are not my idea of ideal discussion and I don’t see a point to retaining it. “Noob questions” are fine, using a discussion board as a first resource for a basic question is not.
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I agree to an extent. I feel discussions have lost depth online. Since most of the time online users don’t have the same caliber as one may be more used to in the 2010 and prior era of the internet. I feel, on sites like Reddit, i leave discussions feeling more confused and/or exhausted rather than enlightened.
It really really depends.
“What time does ASDA shut?” - well the answer involves someone in the comment section googling it, I can see the “just Google it” frustration.
But
“Why is the bottom of my 3D print really messy?” - anyone who could claim to be intermediate at 3D printing would know that it is either a support material issue, or maybe they haven’t got “bridging” settings turned on. Replying with “a simple Google would find it was an issue with bridging” but the person asking the question may not even know that phrase to use.
Edit: I like to do the old “this is what i think it is, but here are some terms you could use to better understand in case my solution doesn’t work”
That second scenario you’ve described is why I loathe this “just fucking google it” mantra.
Searching for stuff needs some amount of information to begin with. You need to know what search terms to use, which means you have to know something about the problem you’re trying to solve. And a lot of times, that is precisely the problem: not knowing what even to include in the search query. With a human on the other side of the tube, it’s something that could easily be remedied with a few follow-up questions, but a search engine can’t do that–nor do you want for it to do that.
EDIT: Clarified things.
Changed “And a lot of times, that is precisely the problem: not knowing how to formulate the search query” to “And a lot of times, that is precisely the problem: not knowing what even to include in the search query.”
Googling niche topics usually takes me to reddit/quora where someone has already asked the same question and someone has already answered. But sometimes (rarely) it takes to threads where the first comment says “google it” 😑.
Did you mean recursion?
I rarely tell people to just Google something, and when I do it’s usually in addition to me giving an explanation, telling them exactly what to google and which results to look for, and it’s to provide additional examples or visual references of the thing I just explained after I have vetted those google results myself.
I’d generally rather participate in the conversation and help make someone into one of today’s “lucky 10,000” (I’m gonna be an asshole and tell you to google that and click the link to XKCD if you don’t get the reference)
But some of the things that people will turn to reddit (and now probably now Lemmy,) yahoo answers (is that still a thing?) Facebook, etc. instead of just googling does baffle me sometimes. One example that bugs me whenever there’s an election coming up, is people on Facebook asking about voting - where their polling place is, how to register, when the deadline for mail-in ballots is, etc. It’s all pretty straightforward information that shouldn’t need a whole lot of explaining, and is very easily Google-able. Half the time you don’t even need to click a link and the information is right there on the Google result page. And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re showing interest and wanting to participate in democracy, but it does worry me a little because if they can’t even research that much themselves, how much research are they going to put into the candidates and issues to make an informed decision?
Personally I like to google things, I like going on my own personal little journey of discovery and falling down a rabbit hole clicking links and learning more about everything. I love having so much information at my fingertips and my first instinct when I encounter something I don’t know, or am curious about, etc. is to start googling it. It’s wild to me that not everyone has that same little spark of curiosity driving them to learn more as quickly as possible and would rather ask a question and have to wait for an answer. I also like sharing that knowledge, there have been times I’ve seen someone ask a question online, thought it was a good question so I googled it myself and shared what I came up with, but it still kind of burned at the back of my mind “why didn’t they Google it themselves?”
Now we don’t have to discuss facts because we can look them up but rather discuss whether things are good or bad or certain aspects of them. We don’t have to discuss “is there climate change?” But we can discuss what to do
I do google a lot of stuff before bringing it up in a conversation, just to be sure I’m not making stuff up, even if it’s something I’ve looked up 100 times
Same but mostly because I’ve had conversations with people who will Google something to tell me I’m wrong when the whole point was the conversation, not being right.
>google question >reddit thread with exact question as title >one comment >”just google it”
The real irony is that, for a number of questions, the “answer” was either in StackOverflow or one of its similar sites, or in Reddit
Or more infuriating is when I AM searching Google and the results bring me to some asshat saying “Just google it bruh.”
U too?! Bro, i tough it was something wich could happened but just in really weird instances, but it seem like isn’t really strange at all.
I remember pulling my hair the first time it happened, I was absolutely baffled!
Why would you even take the time out of your day to go on a Q&A forum and respond like this to someone asking a question? Do these people not have hobbies? That kind of response is more insulting than just not getting a response.
Yeah, if you’re going to respond you should make the response useful. You can politely tell them to make use of Google and answer the question.
