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How should we deal with Google questions?
Fairly often, I come across questions that can literally be answered by typing the key words of the question title into Google and picking any of the first page results. Some examples of what I am talking about:
- Stupid Sort and its Order: Top two results for "stupid sort order" are the wiki pages for Bogosort and Gnomesort, explaining that they are sometimes called Supid Sort, how they work, and their complexity.
- Remove array value: Searching for basically any permutation of "PHP remove array value" yields the PHP doc page for
unset()
as the top result. - Breadth First Search and Depth First Search: Top two results for "Breadth First Search and Depth First Search" are the wiki pages for BFS and DFS, complete with explanations, diagrams and sample code.
I always downvote questions like these, since they certainly do not show any research effort, but should this type of question be closed? If so, which close category do they fit into?
Personally, I would answer "Yes" and "I don't know" to these questions, for two reasons:
- The answers that get posted are invariably not as good as the ones you get by just searching, or are just links to the relevant pages. So these questions are not really contributing anything worthwhile.
- An abundance of "obvious" questions creates noise for people asking/looking for "real" questions.
I have found some related questions and links on Meta, but there doesn't seem to be any clear consensus from what I have read:
- SE Blog - Are Some Questions Too Simple? Discusses a "General Reference" close reason, which I guess fell by the wayside? EDIT: Looks like the powers that be decided against this: Introduce a “general reference” close reason
- What is SO policy about noob and “please debug this code for me” questions Similar question, but not much discussion.
- Is it appropriate to ask questions on Stack Overflow without prior research? Consus seems to be (understandably!) "No", but there is no discussion of closing/voting.
- Should a clear lack of research be grounds for closing a question? Thanks to Alenanno for digging this one up. It asks essentially the same question, but the only answer recommends following the flow chart from the SE blog entry above. Unfortunately that flow chart ends with "Close as General Reference", which is not an option on SO.