Answering a question with "google it" is self-defeating

[suncowiam]

Rubbish.

Gesundheit

[Edited] Believe what you want to believe...

 

[suncowiam]

Google like Wikipedia is only as good as the person using it.

Here's an example.

Go to google and type in "what".

Autocomplete returned with "what does the fox say" as the first entry.

Then it returns "whatsapp" as the second entry.

I believe that is based on social trends for the results.

I agree with your comment but my point being is that Google has purposes that are not neutral.

 

[suncowiam]

I love Google and feel very confortable using it, but I still fail to see how that could be true. Google largely refrains from making value judgements about the sites it indexes, and it will fail to index quite a few for various reasons.

More to the point, it isn't really all that customizable. One may direct its search by using specific parameters, but that is about all.

If you are logged into Google, I believe it is building statistics based on your searches. In a way it is customizing to you but behind your back. I'm actually not sure if the current searches you do are based on previous searches. Plus, Apple has asserted that Google also snoops your emails if you have a gmail account to help further build its image of you.

So in all, it is retrieving answers that are biased to your indirect involvement.

 

[Riverwolf]

And yet its true. People ask questions which they can answer themself in a couple of minutes.

And obvious answers get the obvious answer.

Does anyone here happen to know what the capital city of the United States is?

This is a great example of what I believe you're talking about, Flankerl: it's a question that is stupid, where even a hundred thousand "google it" responses are unlikely to crowd out Wikipedia's page on Washington D.C., the US government's own website, etc. Heck, even asking what the capital city of a more obscure country like, say, Malawi would be far more quickly answered with a google search. (It's Lilongwe, BTW. Both country name and capital city name sound great on the tongue ^_^).

Questions regarding unambiguous facts aren't really what I'm talking about.

What are you searching for when this happens?

Excellent question.

I see it most often when I'm having computer trouble, and trying to find a solution online. It happens most often when the main goto sites for such things (e.g. Stack Overflow) don't have the exact problem I'm having, or the answer provided didn't work. Getting an answer on that site can take a while, so I prefer to just search for the answer, and only ask if I desperately need one and have fruitlessly searched for a few days.

In hindsight, I definitely should have specified that I'm talking about searching the internet for solutions to problems that I don't have the technical know-how to solve myself, or for personal insights or further information that online articles, etc. don't have; I'm not talking about quickly searching for a known fact.

 

[Riverwolf]

Excellent: do no preliminary research because you simply flood search engines and will have neither the time nor energy to process the results. Seriously?

Just last night I was trying to do some research on a semi-obscure topic (I don't remember exactly what, but it involved Germanic linguistics), and after 5 pages of searching (not counting sponsored links, that's 50 websites), found diddly-squat; all the pages returned had nothing to do with what I was trying to search for.

The one doing the research isn't the one flooding the search engines with nonsense. Providing the answer of "google it" is what's causing the flood, and making that preliminary research needlessly more difficult, while instead the information could have been provided, making future research easier. Is it somehow "better" for research to be artificially difficult?

The lack of time and/or energy isn't for processing the results. It's for the actual act of research itself. Nerds like us do this sort of thing for abnegation, especially in regards to topics that interest us, and so it can be difficult for us to fully understand that the act of research (an art that isn't properly taught in any case) is work.

So, here's a hypothetical illustration.

Come home from a long, 8-hour day of just dull, drab, soul-crushing office work. All you want to do is just freaking relax. But nope, the household needs some tending to, and the kids need help with their homework. You still have to provide for that, and do so, albeit with some difficulty focusing from sheer exhaustion. But in the process of helping, you find you need to find more information on a particular topic than Wikipedia provides, or a problem comes up that needs solving. You don't have access to any of the books the Wiki page cites (they're not at the library, and you don't have the money to spend >50 USD on these beasts, online or otherwise), so you decide to go to a forum and ask some experts. You need an answer quickly, and don't have the time to explain the full situation, so you just up and ask the question. However, because they just assume you didn't do any preliminary research of your own, since you didn't take an hour to explain what you already knew, they just tell you to "google it".

This is unfair, and self-defeating. In addition to being deliberately (and unnecessarily) rude, now anyone else trying to do the same research in the future has to sift through that particular forum post, and any others the guy might have gone to, in order to get to the desired information. It basically prevents adequate research from being possible, and to me, basically discourages any and all forms of questioning.

Hence why I appreciate Stack Overflow, which provides guidelines for how to ask questions well when you sign up. That is not common knowledge, yet, and so shouldn't be expected to be.

I say, therefore, that if you're going to answer a question with "google it", don't answer at all. It wastes both your time, and that of the person asking.