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.
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.
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.
and sometimes it’s not about the answer …
i hate how accurate this is
There are lots of benefits to lurking. Nobody jumps on you with pedantic bull crap. Nobody tells you to just Google it. Nobody picks at every god damn little picky thing you say. Nobody bothers you. It's a wonder anybody bothers to post or comment at all. Life is more peaceful for lurkers.
Just go against all that and comment. The world needs your voice too.
The problem with this mantra for me is that in a discussion, I don't want to know what website x thinks the definition or answer is, I want to know what you think it is. If the term/issue is uncontroversial then googling is fine, but if it's vague, confusing or has different interpretations, Google could make things worse.
E.g. someone complains that cultural marxism is bringing down western civilization. I could Google this and find out it's an antisemitic conspiracy theory espoused by the Nazis and now the American right. But will this definition help me understand the person I'm talking to and what they mean? Will it help the conversation? Absolutely not.
But if I asked, "what do you mean by that" nd the person responded, e.g. "how the left is pushing diversity in society against the will of ordinary people" (or whatever), then we can have an actual conversation about what is bothering this person.
And another problem with it is it prevents talking.
Some anthropologists liken human speech to chimpanzee grooming. To bond, a chimpanzee will sit there and pick through another chimpanzee’s back hair. Time spent doing this builds a bond between them.
Conversation works that way for humans. It’s just an instinctual emotional need: to put energy into activities that create bonds with other people.
I’m autistic, and learning the above was a sort of breakthrough moment for me in terms of respecting small talk, respecting the real value of a conversation even when there’s no practical need for knowledge transfer.
Of course, I’d rather bond by snuggling because it low-key hurts to talk, but our culture really only permits that with animals, lovers, and family.
Incidentally, that connects with another interesting fact about the Dunbar number.
As some may know that’s the number of people who can live in a tribe or community where everyone’s brain still has the capacity to remember (a) how they feel about each other person and (b) how each other person feels about each other person.
It’s about 120 individuals, for humans. Once it gets beyond 120 people, you start encountering “strangers”. People you might have seen, but you don’t know who they’re tight with, what they’re up to.
For chimps it’s 40 individuals. Chimps can’t keep track of more than 40 nodes in an interrelationship graph of relationships.
So 120 and 40. It’s a ratio of three. Some speculate this ratio is because chimps’ bonding behavior permits bonding with one other individual at a time, and humans’ bonding behavior permits bonding with three individuals at a time.
For chimps, that’s grooming. You can groom one other chimp’s back at a time, allowing you to bond with one other chimp.
With humans it’s talking. So why three people? (This is where it gets really interesting, at least for me.) It’s three people because when one person is speaking to three or fewer people, it’s intimate enough to be a bonding experience. And when a person is speaking to four or more people, it doesn’t feel intimate enough to be a bonding experience.
The really fun part is you can see this happening at social gatherings. Because one speaker can engage three listeners while maintaining intimacy, this means conversations can be two to four people. As soon as a fifth person walks up, beer in hand, to join the conversation, it will split into two conversations. You’ll have a 2 and a 3, instead of one big 5.
Or, if the conversation does stay stable at 5 people, it morphs into more of a “presentation” that separates the group into speakers and audience, and that’s not a bonding experience.
At most social gatherings, people want to connect, so instead of that switch to audience mode the conversation will split when it reaches 5, into separate 2- and 3-person conversations.
So the other problem with the google mantra is it removes an excuse to talk from society, and we need excuses to verbalize at each other so we don’t feel alienated. Asking for directions, bumming a cigarette, talking about the weather or sports, saying good morning and how-are-you-im-fine and hello, these are all cultural scaffolds that make excuses to hear each other’s voices.
And asking for basic info is part of that. In conversations, we get more things to say if we normalize asking for and providing basic background info. It helps people get their voices warmed up, to say things that aren’t that deep, to present easily-found knowledge, just warm up the vocal chords with the basic stuff.
Why I started to ask those questions here. And I have gotten back way better responses than I ever gotten from a Google search.
antisemitic conspiracy theory espoused by the Nazis and now the American right. But will this definition help me understand the person
Well... If you know where someone is getting their information, it actually does say a lot about a person.
When I run across an argument like that, I know to back out of it and reassess if it's worth it in the first place.
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?
My favorite is when I would use a google search for something, and several of the top results would be posts detailing the exact question I have, with the only responses being "just google it" and the post locked/closed to further responses.
Don't ask a question, post a wrong answer to the question you have.
That'll give you many answers.
Of course you can always start by RTFM you lazy sod.
Maybe. It does bother me when I see people complain about posts where the person asks a really basic question and someone gives a few words in snide response like, "Google much?" and don't actually answer the question. At the same time, some questions being asked could honestly be answered with a simple Google search, I just don't know what the cutoff is. Sometimes you can get better responses in the comments than you would with a Google search, or the Google searches themselves will just turn up Reddit comments where somebody else asked the same question once upon a time. I think it does help to refresh the information sometimes, rather than just relying on Google Searches for information, sometimes you get actual real-world experts chiming in like, "Yeah, everybody thinks it's A, but actually it's B because of X, Y, and Z, it's a common mistake that alot of people make." So I'll usually err on the side of just let ask whatever they want to, no matter how basic a question.
Many times Google has led me on a wild goose chase, sending me to thread after thread where the only answers are "just Google it durrr". Google results are not stable. If you have time to post a snarky comment and it's so easy to Google, then why not Google it and include a link with your snark?
Also, Google (and web search in general) has generally gone down the crapper over the last 5-10 years. SEO is practically a solved problem, but it's mostly bad actors who benefit from it. Google doesn't seem to care to play the cat-and-mouse game anymore.
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.
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"
>google question >reddit thread with exact question as title >one comment >”just google it”
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
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 🧡
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"
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.
The trouble with google search these days is...
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you have a question that you need answered, but don't know the answer to? Everyone runs into this issue from time to time, but fortunately there is a simple solution. By using google search to find your answer, you will be both satisfied and educated by the result! People across the world use this simple tool every day to find answers to a wide variety of questions.
Then after 2+ paragraphs of that you're lucky if there's an answer at all, not to mention a correct one.
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."
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
The worst outcome is when the first google result is a thread that only has an answer of "just google it"
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.
Maybe "just Google it" will take you to a stackoverflow post where the mods have also decided nah this is a duplicate have closed the conversation 😆
Yeah it's kind if strange behaviour to be on a discussion board and only contribute by killing the discussions by pointing to Google.
I get that people get annoyed by low effort posts and people's general inabilty to find information independently. But there are better ways...
Especially since that discussion might be found later via Google as well. It's more helpful to say that you looked it up via a specific search and give a couple of the results. That way it's not a dead end and the person hopefully learns how to help themselves in the future by example.
I really hate the "just google it" responses to questions online. Not only are they rude, they also actively damage the internet as a growing document. Even if you DO want to be an arrogant prick and say "you are a moron and google has the answer", you can do that AND post the answer. Whatever you post online is not a discussion in the moment but rather instantly becomes a part of the internet that will age with it.
Comments will sit forever unchanged, but google results will change. Oftentimes the thread being written in that very moment will become the top google result down the line.
The correct response to a question to which you know the answer, no matter how stupid it is, is:
Optional remark about how the OP should have googled
Single sentence stating the correct answer
A few sentences providing more detail, if more detail is needed
Link to the source, optional but recommended especially if the link has even more detail to read about and especially if you included the "you could have googled this" remark.
(this applies to matters of fact; opinions you usually don't need to cite etc)
If the link isn't to a self-archiving site like wikipedia, and you want to be really thorough, go to https://web.archive.org/ and plug the link into the "save page now" module on the bottom right -- that way if the page goes down or changes in the future, someone who finds the thread in the future can go to the wayback machine and see your link as it was when you made the post
In a similar way, proper etiquette if you post a question and it gets answered in the thread, especially if it gets answered in pieces in multiple replies, OR if you find the solution outside the thread (especially in this case), is to edit your post with a summary of what you found.
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?"
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.
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 don't think so. People who answer with "Just Google it" wouldn't have contributed to any meaningful or interesting, to begin with. At most, they would have ignored the question. People who would answer the question usually aren't discouraged by others saying "Just Google It" either.
The only instance would be if a person actually does google their own question and then doesn't check the conversation again. But I would also argue that these people would have at most responded with a "thank you" to any explanation either. As even if they found the answer themselves if they were interested in a discussion about it, they would and could still do so.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Its a hard habit to break out of though - I always feel like I should exhaust other resources before asking questions.
When I ask things without looking it up first, it feels like I'm not doing my best to solve my own problem before "bothering" others
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.
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
