I’m very new here, but I’ve been reading a lot of the questions and wondered if a reasonable answer would be:
Make Google your friend for 20 seconds before you ask questions.
Or if that would be considered branding and it would be better phrased:
Make an anonymous-generic-search engine your friend for 20 seconds before you ask questions.
I’m very new here, but I’ve been reading a lot of the questions and wondered if a reasonable answer would be:
Nope. That is not a answer. Nothing of what you are saying would ever be a reasonable answer since an answer is not a commentary judgement call on another user’s capabilities. An answer is an answer. You could possibly use a tone like that if you can actually provide a real answer to the issue by saying, “Here is what you can do. I just Googled it from this site.” But as an answer in and of itself, nope.
That said—as someone who has been doing tech work for years—I feel your pain, and that kind of tone might be used as a comment since “Have you tried Google?” is the modern equivalent of “Read the flying *cough* manual.” But just not without giving the person asking the question the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is not branding/promotion of using “Google,” but rather the immediate aggressive tone. I will admit I have asked if someone did some basic Google searching while dealing with quite bad questions, but only in frustration, only in the comments and only when the question was so bad I avoided standing up to watch it get down voted and closed.
So my approach would be to assume good faith. Some people truly come here in a panic when they have a problem and leave out details, but a simple comment stating, “Well, did you even do a basic Google search? Because I just did and found this, that and the other…” The deal is that sometimes people do come back and say, “Oh, I forgot to mention that…” Other times people will just say, “I saw those, I don’t know what those mean… Please help me! This is urgent!”
The reality is you honestly cannot assume someone is just being dense to be dense. It’s better to assume right away that someone needs real help and their lack of details that could be coming from panic are rooted in a rush to find a solution more than anything else.
If they then just act dense and—honestly—like an idiot looking for free tech support as if this place is an on-demand help desk, then just politely walk away and say, “Look if you can’t help yourself, we can’t help you…”
If you feel that the question is basic and was certainly answered hundred times already, take your time to search for answers on the Stack Exchange site the question is asked, and if you find one, flag the new question as a duplicate. It will not earn you any reputation you might have gained by answering it, but it will keep the site clean in the long run.
Short of existing answer on the site the question is asked, you should consider either writing one, or leaving that task to others.
Googling properly is an art and even if one chooses to pick the way of the two fowls moving, or small cushioned sound, one must still learn to work in harmony with his tools. Or have a wide and varied vocabulary of curse words. Using a search engine well is an acquired skill.
I learnt it in a secret monastery in the Himalayas that was seeking enlightenment in the works of a hundred million evolved apes typing on keyboards in a university module on research, which was amazingly good. (Dunno if the university still does it. Amusingly the most useful course of my time there as an undergrad.)
There's a reason the site “let me Google that for you” is (was?) blacklisted as a link here. And don't forget, Google searches often feed back here.
If an answer's simple
And is so obviously trivial that the owner obviously did not put his brain in gear? is it? Has it been asked before? (close as dupe) hasn't it (is it worth posting an amusing answer? or
Is there some unexpected depth (comment! Dig down the rabbit hole of mundanity to find the lagomorph of interestingness!)
If it's trivially searchable or self evident but there's no answer, it may be a good opportunity get a bit of reputation by posting a good, well explained answer which would then get picked up by Google and these noobs can get off your lawn users might find the answer here.
Online etiquette shouldn't be much different to face-to-face etiquette. Please see the excellent answers and comments to this related question on the Workplace.SE site:
From Monica Cellio's excellent answer:
When this happens to me I usually ask "what search terms did you try?". This way if they did try to search I might be able to help them search more effectively, and if they didn't they sometimes say "ummm..." and go away.
...even if I strongly suspect they didn't try I will act as if they did. That way if they did I don't look bad.
You simply don't know if they've researched it or not. Pretending that you do is extremely arrogant and needlessly frustrating if the asker has spent the last hour googling it, wading through pages and pages of poor quality cr*p that doesn't help.
Even if you have searched on this and found good quality stuff, maybe you used better search terms. It's easy to choose the right search terms when you already know the answer. Helping people search better is a great way to help people help themselves.
From starsplusplus's comment:
What I love about this answer is that it assumes good intent but does it in a way that will make them feel bad if there was no good intent ... an underlying assumption that they wouldn't possibly have come to ask you if they hadn't already Googled... right? ;)
This is a site with high standards. Let's keep it that way:
If you were a good, conscientious user, which site sounds better?
The nature of these sorts of posts is not much different than pointing users to LMGTFY. It's rude and unacceptable for Stack Exchange.
Remember that answer posts must represent a meaningful attempt to answer the question. A response along the lines of "make <search engine> your friend" does not by itself address the question. Furthermore, such responses indicate laziness on the part of the answer author and a negative attitude towards the OP, contrary to our code of conduct. These posts simply do not belong on our site.
