Internet Search

[BadBob]

Why is it that people post questions on here that take about 5 seconds to find out on any half decent search engine. I'd don't have a problem with people posting anything they wish to ask but if I want to find something out I'll do a google search first and then if nothing came up then I would ask here. Simply for the reason its a whole lot quicker. For example somebody today asked 'Why is the Sky Blue ?', just typing that into google will return loads of pages answering that question directly, yet they have to wait for somebody to come in here and then reply, and then get an e-mail.

[Dave Potts]

I entered your question into Google and it came back with "Your search did not match any documents." I WOULD try 'Google Answers' but it's $2.50. Scandalous. I guess some people are just plain lazy. Or tight. Or both.

[boognish76]

I reckon around 90% of the questions asked could be answered by a quick Google, but if everyone did that then this site would cease to be.

[BadBob]

It was never a complaint, I'm more than happy for somebody to post such questions. One of the reasons to visit the site is to see what questions people are asking. The point I was making was if you want to know something why go the long route. I'm not claiming people are lazy as its more effort to put the question on here than do a quick search.

[BadBob]

I wouldnt say the percentage is that high, and there are plenty of questions your not going to get answered easily on google. Its just some of them.

[froggequene]

I asked this question once and got my head virtually bitten off for asking it, admittedly, I had phrased it badly and wasn't in a position to defend myself. I think some of isn't so much laziness as maybe not knowing how to use a search engine properly. But we don't know how many people who are simply lurking around checking out questions, how many people feel part of the community and that they're safe asking what appears to be an obvious or stupid question. For some questions, as you know yourself there are just so many pages thrown up by web pages that it's just nice to take the 'lazy' route and see if other people have reliable sources of information that can be used.

[brawburd]

because they can!

[darth vader]

there is definitely an art to successful search engine use - the average person doing a search gets 42 squillion results and is shied off straight away. A more experienced person would know the keywords to use and the ones to avoid (like "sex" :-) to get a more accurate list of responses. By posting here you only ever get a few responses so i guess it's easier AND more liable to get an accurate answer at AB.

BTW the word "sex" found 19.6 million results at Altavista!

[darth vader]

271 million at google - proof you can get more sex at google :-)))))))

[Bert]

I, too, had my head bitten off for suggesting that somebody who wanted to know where Timbuctoo (may have been another spelling) was should have consulted an atlas before asking Answerbank.

[Bert]

I put the question into Google and got 5,510,000 hits, so Dave Potts must be doing something wrong.