Embrace the non-Googlers

Question

There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to "easy" questions that involve quickly answering by copy/pasting embarrassing links to lmgtfy.com (or similar responses in comments, which aren't downvotable) in an attempt to belittle the questions' authors. I think this comes from engagement in forums, where people would ask simple questions like "What is a variable?"

I would argue that we should NOT do this. As Stack Overflow grows, it is quickly becoming THE source of Google's suggestions. For instance, yesterday I did a quick search on Google for a particular framework, and Stack Overflow came up in the top three results.

Joel expressed a desire in recent podcasts to see Stack Overflow as the ultimate source for all programming-related questions. I am sympathetic of this view, as I would like to see all questions (including "What is a variable?") welcomed on Stack Overflow, because it is the best place for those questions to be asked.

Answers are voted upon, which is something that doesn't take place in most other locations. Answers are clarified by the community, something else that isn't happening elsewhere. Questions can be revised by just about anybody. And revision history is there for all to see.

So perhaps in the future, the next time somebody asks how many variables can be put on a page, we should kindly embrace them, and not send them on to Google. Stack Overflow is the ultimate destination — not Google. Sorry, Larry and Sergey.

Related FAQ: How should we deal with Google questions?

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Answer 1

This has been something that a good deal of us have been trying to do for months now. When we see someone post something along the lines of LMGTFY or "You should have googled first" we comment telling them that it is not useful for precisely the same reasons you are giving above.

And then we will downvote them.

EDIT very much ex post facto: "LMGTFY" is now officially banned.

Answer 2

It's typically my policy to simply delete LMGTFY responses, but I just want to make clear what I consider acceptable and not acceptable.

Acceptable:

If you Google the obvious search terms to a very simple question, I think it's acceptable to say something like "I Googled X + Y and it gave me the following results," and give a link to the site with the answer (not to Google). I think this is okay because sometimes people just don't know what terms to search for. It might be obvious to you if you know the answer already, but not obvious to the person asking.

Unacceptable:

A link to lmgtfy.com with no other content whatsoever. When I see these, I make a minimal effort to turn them into an acceptable answer, but 9/10 of the time I delete them. If another answer already directly refers to the same material that a Google search turns up, I delete the LMGTFY link without trying to fix it. The direct answer wins. Feel free to flag LMGTFY for moderator attention.

Answer 3

Here's some empirical evidence that lmgtfy links and perhaps even requiring prior research might be a bad idea. A colleague was searching for something about typeof in Java. So he googled for "java typeof". The top result was a web forum where the first answer suggested the OP google for "java typeof"! I'd hate to see a similar situation happen here.

Answer 4

It has always been unacceptable to use lmgtfy. It is even in the FAQ.

If you see someone using a lmgtfy reply, edit it to remove it and report it to the mods.

Answer 5

If someone doesn't present a reason to believe they tried to research first, it is perfectly ok to instruct them in the very important art of doing their research. "Teach a man to fish" and all that.

Perhaps a useful compromise in the community could be an encouragement for questioners to "show their work" and list the trouble they've already taken.

By the way, centralizing all programming answers in SO is an internet smell. What you want is an internet that has many sources so that you don't centralize power or risk. When SO goes down, everything else remains, and it should suffice.

Answer 6

I just got into a discussion/exchange on this subject via comments on a closed question. This struck me as odd since a) enough people thought the question was wrong for SO to close it, and b) the very asking of the question itself indicated that the OP had given little or no thought about the subject at hand (i.e. Would Linux ever become a paid-OS?).

Someone directed me to MSO to discuss this and, quite frankly, I'm saddened by what I see here. I'm a geezer geek and have been participating in forums of one sort or another since 1973 (Notes on PLATO IV). What was originally attractive about SO to me was the generally high quality of the questions asked and the equally high quality of the answers given -- real thought went into some of these answers and I often learned something new, something that is still a real joy for me even after 37+ years.

Unfortunately I see the average question quality beginning to slip, largely because of the increasing numbers of "I couldn't be bothered to google this so you should answer it for me" types of question being asked by people with 1 or 2 rep points. It's gotten to the point where I almost wish for a filter (ALA Slashdot's vote-level filter) where I only look at questions asked by someone with more than X (100?) rep points. I wouldn't go quite that far because it is obviously the wrong way to address the problem, but it is clear that the majority of the really bad questions (translation: could have been trivially answered elsewhere) are from very low-rep-point members.

One of the links I came across while reading the many MSO posts/comments on this issue struck me as hitting the nail squarely on the head. It is on the subject of Help Vampires and it describes a cycle I have seen countless times over the years. One of the most damaging side effects of a Help Vampire infestation is that it often causes very senior members of the community to visit the site/forum less and less, thereby reducing the chance of having a truly enlightening answer from a bona fide guru. E.g asking a question in comp.lang.c and getting a response from dmr@alice.UUCP.

I agree that an SO answer that consists solely of a lmgtfy link is a waste of everyone's time, but perhaps there could be a new close option that basically says the same thing. This might be enhanced by allowing the closers to supply suggested google queries that the OP might have used.

Basically, I'm suggesting formalizing the lmgtfy answer in such a way as to get this type of "I can't be bothered to think/google/read the FM or the FFAQ" question out of the mainstream of OS. It might even be a chance to auto-generate a new type of FAQ where the answers are links to queries.

Just a thought.

Answer 7

In principle I agree that we should not belittle people posting questions.

But I'd like to suggest that the following concept:

"Joel expressed a desire in recent podcasts to see Stack Overflow as the ultimate source for all programming-related questions. I am sympathetic of this view, as I would like to see all questions (including "What is a variable?") welcomed on Stack Overflow, because it is the best place for those questions to be asked."

...can be taken way too far.

One of the tags I follow at Stack Overflow is "jquery", so using that as an example (where obviously similar examples exist for other technologies): people post questions along the lines of "What does the jQuery .fadeIn() function do?" This is a specific function that is already very well documented elsewhere; repeating that documentation within Stack Overflow really isn't helpful.

If somebody asks a very generic question like that about a jQuery function they should be directed to the jQuery API documentation website. Surely somebody who has the Google skills to find Stack Overflow in the first place could manage to find jQuery's website too, but some people start treating Stack Overflow as if it is Google. It's not.

On the other hand, if somebody says "I'm trying to use .fadeIn() as follows [code example] and it's not doing what I expect because [reason]", or "I know that .fadeIn() does [x], but is there a similar way to achieve [y]?" well then a Stack Overflow question is reasonable.

Answer 8

I see one unchallenged assumption in all this discussion so far, which is that Google is always right for 'simple' questions.

We all know that Google can throw up crap too. I sincerely hope that there is a higher chance of getting the CORRECT answer to a simple programming question on Stack Overflow than there is off Google.

(Just another reason for answering simple questions on Stack Overflow.)

Answer 9

I'm not trying to belittle you concerns, seriously...

but I simply have not seen this as any sort of a problem on Stackoverflow. On the contrary, I find that some of the simplest questions generate some of the most thoughtful and interesting conversations.

For the very few people who post "ask google" responses, they are likely just following the type of response they learned from other systems. They are almost universally met with down-votes accompanied by comments that say it is not appreciated here.

That has been my experience.

Answer 10

You shouldn't send them to Google and nothing else but you should at least try to teach them how to use Google by providing the relevant search terms.

Answer 11

The only time I post a link that uses outside search engines, I post carefully crafted URLs, so that the link will always go to where I intended it to go. For example, if I want to link to a wiki page on some random site, but I think that page may at some point change locations, I use a Google I'm Feeling Lucky URL, with enough search terms that I'm fairly confident of its destination.

Example:

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

becomes

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&btnI=&q=site%3Amingw.org+"about+MSYS"

I don't see any other reason being worthy of my time to point out.

Answer 12

When an easy question comes up, you can do one of to things:

1. You can post a quick link or quote an article and gain a quick few points
2. You can post a long drawn out answer you revise and tweak and gain a bunch of rep from it.

Do what you wish. But if you don't write the good answer, someone else will.

Answer 13

While I have mentioned in the past that I think people should have used Google before posting I have never thought that posting a link to lmgtfy served as an answer. I also think that people should experiment with their IDE before posting too.

The reason I think this - it's because that's what I do when looking at answers I'm not 100% sure of the answer to. It's often the case when I am sure too - just to make sure I've got the syntax right!

I understand that people are under all sorts of pressures when developing and if you're a lone developer it can be hard to spot where you're going wrong sometimes. I've been in that position myself, so I can't really complain about anyone posting simple questions. After all the question is only simple if you know the answer.