this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Its honestly tragic that people feel the need to put these disclaimers. "Just google it" was always a shitty response to people asking legitimate questions (some people learn better from conversational interaction rather than just reading an essay), but with the slow death of search engines we're now experiencing, at this point anyone who yells "Just google it" needs to be ejected into the fucking sun.
"Just Google it" was always worthless advice, even when Google worked right. When you look up information on the Internet, you need prior knowledge in order to assess the information. Maybe this is great info? Maybe it's dumb and whoever wrote it is a moron? Without prior knowledge you don't know. With prior knowledge you can see what they say about the things you already know and decide from that.
I once tried to configure a Cisco access point, with zero prior experience with Cisco IOS. Simple stuff, but I knew nothing and had to Google it. I found some blog explaining it, but it looked weird. But I also knew IOS is weird, so maybe it's right? Hard to say! I reached out to an old friend who is Cisco certified to verify, he told me to ignore that thing and showed me what I should actually do. It really made me realize how useless googling something is if you don't have the prior knowledge to assess it.
Absolutely. A lot of the time the biggest difficulty with researching something is not even knowing the right terms to search for. Asking a few questions can give you a starting point to know where and how to look.
And the thing is, I personally hate asking questions on forums and the like. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've done it. I'm very good at digging up answers by myself, and I generally do work better with essays than I do with conversations. But my experience should not be seen as the default, and people shouldn't be shit on for trying to learn through community rather than through textbooks.
Whilst I agree with your opinion, it continues to astonish me that the majority of non-technical people using a search engine have absolutely no idea just how bad the search landscape has become.
I suppose my question did probably exclude that part of the population, but old habits die hard.
I still use + and - to exclude search terms until I remember that Google+ broke that and I forgot just how ad infested the internet is until I accidentally click on a piece of empty space in an article that would have an ad, were it not for the pihole in my network.
So, yeah. Point taken.