I think some people’s only method of obtaining information is to ask other people. They either can’t look things up or (more likely I suspect) prefer information someone else has given them, in particular - as opposed to information generally available.
I think it’s related to the way some people’s primary method of working out what to do is to watch what everyone else does, and copy them.
I have found the quality of posts here on SDMB to be about 100X that of the posts on FB.
There are some folks on FB that I’m pretty sure would get lost if they went a block away from their houses. Others would get banned from SDMB in about 10 minutes of posting here.
Yeah, but not more than a hundred times a day.
This. We (SDMB) far from perfect, but the laziest of the lazy hang out on FB. And the most undisciplined of the undisciplined.
Agree that many (most?) people do NOT want to use search engines. Search engines do NOT give you THE answer. They give you 20,000 answers to questions kinda near the one you asked. Asking somebody else to distill 20,000 near-misses down to THE answer, even if they do it badly, is SOOOO much easier.
Mentioned above, but unrelated to my whine just above is folks who understand their question, but not the correct terminology to ask about it. “I need a thingy that winds string” is not a successful Google query when you’re really thinking of a kite reel.
I have many times here asked questions of the form “I’d like to Google about topic [insert long winded explanation] but I don’t know the relevant terminology. Can you all help?” And with two or three well chosen nouns and verbs given by others with experience in the field I’m then off to the races. But not before.
On some sites, fighting ignorance takes even longer!
So we should have an agreed-upon acronym for that.
HMGTFM – Help me Google that for me.
My favorite format of SDMB question looks like this:
Paragraph One: “I am curious about (topic). Specifically, I would like to know (question) about (topic).”
Paragraph Two: “I have googled on this using terms (X), (Y), and (Z). I have seen results (A), (B), and (C), but these are not satisfactory for reason (N), and I would appreciate more information.”
This is a perfect question. It defines the scope and it provides guidance as to the desired sort of answer.
Of course, it leads to a corollary behavior to that described so far in this thread, seen with middling frequency here, in which an early respondent appears to read Paragraph One, but not Paragraph Two, and replies: “I googled (X) for you, and I got (A). You’re welcome!”
This has happened to me a couple of times and it’s infinitely frustrating.
I share your pain.
Even better are the folks who read the OP title, glance uncomprehendingly at the OP body, completely ignore the 5-10 existing substantive replies, then say something redundant or wrong about what they thought the title was about. Doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, it sure feels unlike our best work.
Then again, I blame much of that on the fact that so many of us now do our Doping on our phone, not our desktop / laptop as we used to do. Everything is so much harder when viewed through that soda straw. So I guess we need to make allowances for that. As well as make allowances for folks dictating their posts through text to speech. Results in many fewer misspellings and far more randomly wrong words.
Oh yeah, and get off my lawn!! 
[/curmudgeon]
I can see where some people run into problems trying to google things. There have been a few times I simply couldn’t find what I was looking for because it kept bringing up related things that weren’t right. Like most dopers I’m often asking some pretty nitpicky questions and google may be too blunt as instruments go unless you hit upon the perfect set of terms, and a large number of combinations of synonyms may exist. So the “perps” of the OP may give up out of sheer frustration, stop googling anything, let someone else find it for them.
There are some mighty intelligent people in SDMB but I’ve wandered into a thread and googled the answer first time. I just hit on the right terms or maybe it takes a fresh pair of eyes.
Some of the conspiracy theories they’re willing to swallow in there…yep, some are quite content to let others do their thinking for them.
Awhile back I started a thread about not being able to find things. Sometimes the problem is “mis-remembering” details.
Oh, don’t you dare! 
I saw that 13 Going On 30 was being shown on TV over the weekend, so I’m totally expecting that thread to get bumped again soon.
Maybe you’re correct for SDMB posters.
But for those on facebook in my original example? No. They were wondering how to get a new 2022 catalog from a particular company, and the google search “Catalog, < Company >, 2022” had, as a first result, a link to how to get a free catalog from the company.
I would not be surprised if their technique for getting one was going to their mailbox every day and wondering why it had not arrived. After all, they were wishing really hard. (and yes, this was a grown man)
It’s worth remembering that the first result varies by geography and search history. I have a great deal of difficulty googling things about London, for example, because google directs me to results for London, Ontario by default. It can be difficult to get out of a filter bubble.
I never thought of this!
So it’s possible that my search result was highly influenced by the fact that I’ve been to that particular website before.
Makes a lot of sense.
I love it when I see threads like the above, where the OP has actually done some work before they came here, and the community not only helps them, but doesn’t have to guess at what they were looking for.
But given the intelligence here, I’m still surprised by an entire thread started for an Easily Googlable Question… Especially when the poster is extreeeemely long-winded:
.
When they could have just googled “Can dogs get sick if they eat bananas?”
I have pretty good Google-fu, but sometimes I’ll ask a question here, because I want the discussion that will come with the answer. People here know shit, plus they know it from Shinola.
This is a thing of beauty.
But this occurs more often.
When someone is late to a thread that has gone into hundreds of replies, it’s understandable that they wouldn’t read every reply. That’s no excuse not to read the OP.
If I jump on the end of a long thread without having read the previous 500 posts, I’ll usually begin with “Disclaimer: didn’t read the whole thread,” to fend off curses.
When that kind of thing happens to me, I add “-Ontario” to the search string and search again. Sometimes I do this many times, narrowing the search by filtering out multiple terms that I don’t want.
Can you get around that by googling in an incognito browser window?
I don’t know why people can’t take the time to read. There’s a statement: ‘I ate at the new Italian restaurant last night’. blah blah blah - I swear, underneath in the comments there was ‘where is this restaurant located?’ and an answer - ‘it’s next to Aldi’s on Rt. ___’. Twenty, yes, twenty of the same question, ‘where is this restaurant located?’ and twenty of the same answer.
Some of it. I’m aware of the concept of filter bubbles, so it’s a bit easier to work around, but if you don’t know what the roadblocks are, it can be difficult. I do the same as @ThelmaLou does: just add minuses to remove what I know it thinks I want. The geographical bias is harder to correct for: if I’m searching for something about Italy, in Italian, google keeps returning results in English about local things that could answer the search. There’s no way to set the language preferences to “multiple,” so it’s one or the other.
And, of course, it is DETERMINED to correct my spelling, no matter how deliberately I typed what I meant. I don’t always notice when I type “Loudoun” and it says “Did you mean ‘London’? Returning results for London.” I can imagine someone less familiar with it not realizing that google was changing the search.
Also, when I move to Google Books or Images, it frequently removes my quotation marks. So effective google use is constant attention to detail, which is something most people seem bad at. And the helpful spelling corrections, etc., just encourage people not to pay attention—not to mention speech-to-text. I can’t get Alexa to google ANYTHING complicated.
You just have to ignore the spelling corrections and stick the removed quotation marks back in. Usually the results will say, “did you mean <whatever>?” and give you the option of sticking with the word Google thinks is misspelled. It does take perseverance, and that’s where people tend to give up. Not the super-stubborn ones like me!
While I agree, I think there’s an additional point that we are all taking for granted - technical literacy. This is not intended to be ageist, but that would be the most common ‘trope’ for the issue. I grew up prior to the internet, but with the first generation of search technologies. It’s gotten so much easier as time has gone by to find information that I take it for granted how easy it is to use a modern search engine. But I’m (just) sub-50.
My father, who is smart, savvy, Master’s in Business earning master of means has a VERY hard time using a search engine. It’s utterly unintuitive to him, no matter how many times I show him how I found something.
BUT, and back specifically to Facebook - we have a lot of people who aren’t/weren’t comfortable with a wide array of tech who are there for social interaction with friends and family. They may know how to use that specific app for social media, but going to a browser and trying to find something on their own isn’t part of their skillset.
When I did Tech support, as another example, I’d often have difficulties communicating intent - because I’d ask someone to open a browser so I could check their internet connection and people had NO IDEA what that was. To them it was something opened by other apps on their behalf, or it was just ‘google’ or they had never once used it - the phone was 100% social media - calls - texts - photos.
And that’s leaving out the “I’d google this but I’m on my phone now and that makes it too hard to type” even though speech-to-text is pretty damn good these days.
So in short, we’re (the SDMB) all pretty much tech elitists. People who still use text-based message boards are already pretty much as ‘old-school’ as you’re likely to see online.
On another related note, has anyone else noticed that when smartphones first became ubiquitous, it became popular to use them to settle those little bar-trivia arguments you used to get into when out with your friends, which previously could never really be settled, but since then, we’ve reverted to having said arguments and ignoring the smartphones we all still have?
Pre-2009:
Friend 1: Remember that song “I’m Too Sexy?” Who was that by?
Friend 2: Wasn’t it some one-hit wonder? EMF maybe?
Friend 1: No, EMF’s hit was “Unbelievable.” It was someone else.
Friend 3: Was it Duran Duran?
Friend 2: No, you’re way off. It was definitely a one-hit wonder.
Friend 1: I think they had kind of a funny three-word name and one of the words was a man’s name.
Friend 3: You’re right, wasn’t it Correct Spoke Frank or something like that?
… ad infinitum.
2009 - 2015:
Friend 1: Remember that song “I’m Too Sexy?” Who was that by?
Friend 2: [tap tap tap] Right Said Fred!
2016 - present:
Friend 1: Remember that song “I’m Too Sexy?” Who was that by?
Friend 2: Wasn’t it some one-hit wonder? EMF maybe?
Friend 1: No, EMF’s hit was “Unbelievable.” It was someone else.
… ad infinitum.