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Possible Duplicate:
How should we deal with Google questions?
I am sure that this issue was already raised, but I can't remember the answer. What should I do when I see a question that can be very quickly googled, and it is obvious that the person asking didn't put any effort into asking the question? E.g. What is a best approach to make a function or set of statements thread safe in C#?
You google it, and then answer it. Google should be replaced with SO as the go-to-place for answers regarding programming issues.
Consider the following:
Stackoverflow can manage answers, correct them, sort them by accuracy, and more. That isn't the case with google-results. Ergo, Stackoverflow is the better choice for any question, regardless how easy or difficult.
The entire idea of StackOverflow is to provide a source where when someone types something into Google, StackOverflow is the first thing that comes up in terms of programming questions. It would look awfully silly for the #1 hit on Google to point to a question where the answer was "Google It!"
First of all. Do not link to "let me google that for you"
Second, kindly point to links on the subject. Don't put in to much effort in creating an elaborate answer.
Google is not always the solution. Feel free to google for C# Thread Safety and witness the amount of crap you get - some results are totally wrong (pretty much anything around the use of volatile...) or otherwise unhelpful, and for someone who doesn't know about this topic, it's hard (if not impossible) to find the good ones.
How about this: Google the topic. If a (sufficiently similar) SO question appears in the first page of results, then close it as a dupe. Otherwise, it's a good question.
The existing answers to this question are old, and no longer reflect the current mindset of the team or community.
As Stack Overflow has grown, the number of trivial questions it receives has increased, causing problems for the site's signal-to-noise ratio. As a result, people have become less tolerant of such questions than they were in 2009.
In February 2011, Jeff followed up a podcast with a blog post that asked whether some questions were just too simple for Stack Overflow. It doesn't explicitly come out and say that the answer is yes, but it does close with this:
Allow your Q&A community to fill itself with enough “General Reference” type questions and you’ll soon find no experts there at all.
The team is experimenting with using "General Reference" as a close reason on some sites, with great community support. As of this writing, it hasn't been considered successful enough to be deployed network-wide, but it also hasn't been considered a failure, per Jeff.
EDIT :
Apparently, this was discussed in the week before I posted this answer. See Has a consensus been reached on whether or not some questions are too simple? The answer from Jeff there boils down to "sometimes."
