One thread which suprised me for it’s total lack of effort by the poster was this one asking about the KGB. If you query KGB in google, the first hit gives you more information than you could ever need about it. I posted the website to the thread saying “google is your friend”. While I don’t care that the person asked the question, it was mildly annoying that the poster obviously didn’t even bother trying to research it and posted here.
I can understand when someone asks what a “Hemi” engine is but not, “What is the KGB? I know it is something like the CIA but that’s it”.
There are also times when, frankly, a simple Google search doesn’t help much because there’s no one to help give all that info some context. That’s where the people here are so fab.
If you’ll allow me to wax philosophical and prognosticate (that is, if you don’t have the sense to skip down a bit right now), but I think this is what’s already begun as part of the next wave of IT: People who are domain specialists and are also people-people, to the extent that they haven’t forgotten what needs to be explained in order to get the layman up to speed on a specialist concept, answering questions and compiling good repositories of info on a specific topic.
Webpages and Usenet form some of the structure of this evolution, and the SDMB is a part of that structure. People seem to have a natural urge to say something, especially if that something makes them look smart or friendly or otherwise socially fit. Google Answers has harnessed this as a moneymaking scheme, whereby people pay to have questions answered by experts Google has rounded up and paid to give good answers in the domain they are expert in. Dialing Information largely isn’t an option anymore, but the role has been filled.
Why are humans so popular? Because they tailor responses and give context based on the questioner’s level of knowledge. They act as a buffer against information overflow, preventing the irrelevant details from swamping the person. Google can deliver hundreds of thousands of unique matches to a given search term, but only an experienced human can effectively prune and condense well enough to actually answer a question.
Basic information is no longer a limiting factor. You can get more basic information than you can handle. Context and tailoring are the limiting factors, and those who can turn mountains of information into simple answers will become as wealthy as those who built the first databases.
Ah, I see. You actually meant that Peter Hollingworth, the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane should have posted it. Thanks for clearing that up. Or not. Whatever.
Also, with a web search you can find discrete answers to discrete questions, but Google ain’t gonna find you someone that’s been through a specific experience you’re interested in that you can ask multiple questions to.
