In recent months, I’m seeing a rise in “Why post your stupid question here, when you can find an answer with thirty seconds of a good Google search?” responses to General Questions threads. With Google and Wikipedia close at hand, is there still a reason for the General Questions subforum to exist? Are “Just do a Google search durrr” or “Why didn’t you do a Google search durrrr” responses considered good SDMB etiquette?
In general, dissing someone for not Googling is bad form. Just my opinion.
Is there a reason to keep GQ? Sure. Not everything in life is available on-line or from Wikipedia. There are specialist here that have more info than you can find by using those aforementioned tools.
Let me ammend my previous comment.
If you’re looking for something pretty mundane, such as when a person was born, then Google it.
If your question has some nuance to it, such as when did people start doing xxx, then perhaps you can’t find that.
Try Googling your question, but if you aren’t satisfied with the answer, then ask the Dope.
GQ brings my attention to questions that otherwise would not occur to me.
General Questions often has threads about subjects that aren’t easily researched. These include unusual information about animals, the law, medical conditions, automobiles, etc.
However, the increasingly frequent practice of using GQ as a place to do your own easily accomplished research is really a misuse of the forum. Where the Straight Dope is available at the touch of a finger, the message board isn’t really intended to be a live answer service for lazy people. You’d think it wouldn’t matter, and in a perfect world it wouldn’t, but here, it slows down the server, diverting resources best used on recipe-trading in Cafe Society, or flame wars in The Pit. 
I find this rather peculiar. I don’t think the practice is even remotely “increasingly frequent”. It’s happened all along. Once in a while you get an offbeat question and once in a while we’ll get lucky that someone familiar with the topic will catch it. General goofy and quickly answered questions are the norm, AFAIS. What do you think the purpose of GQ forum is?
Why do you want to know? Has GQ become abandoned and desolate? Have all the good questions been asked and now we’re left with the detritus?
What justifies sharing information to seekers of wisdom and truth; this has always been the debate (not even a great debate).
It also existed back when we did chats; people would come in and ask questions of various kinds. Sometimes it would be painfully obvious they were searching for shortcuts for term papers or book reports; sadly, more than a few times we had people come in with open book tests asking for answers . . . saddest of all, we had parents come in looking for this information so they could write the term paper/book report for the kid to turn in.
Then we’d wrangle over what was the appropriate course of action. Did we give them the information? (They’d only find it on the net anyway!) Do we tell them to go pound sand? Do we teach them the procedure and force them to find their own answers? Do we make them show their work?
Ultimately we decided we wouldn’t be in the homework business at all, really, but the subject still comes up with some regularity.
In my opinion the SDMB is not the Knowledge Jukebox; you don’t come in and push B17 and get your answers. (I used to say this back when we had chats too. But it still applies.) Now some people would be all offended when I said this; they felt they had the goods and could rattle this stuff off and who was I to keep them from showing what smartypants they were? Some people really enjoy telling people what they need to know.
Get your own website and go into the homework business for yourself, says I.
I think each case like this needs to be determined on its own merits. Some of the best examples of this over the years has been people who were fumbling for the answer and only needed a little help, a push in the right direction, a bit of explanation, some true assistance. The denizens of the Dope have proven to be very good at this and I hope this situation continues. They also seem to have no patience for the truly lazy, unmotivated, and stupid. I don’t either.
“I had to do my homework, so you have to do yours too.”
I think it’s reasonable to show a bit of exasperation to someone who is totally clueless. That being said, unless they are a total using doofus (and those people are usually pretty easy to spot) I don’t think slamming them is going to make them any smarter or make our other users look anything but petty. Sometimes a gentle word is better than a big slap, even if a slap is merited.
And there will (hopefully) always be people who want to know stuff and come here in their search for answers. I think mostly they get it. We mostly got some answers.
Unless of course you think all the possible questions have already been asked and answered. But I really don’t think we’re there yet. That would be like coming to the end of the internet and that’s not happening any time soon either.
GQ suffers from a lack of moderation, IMO.
Okay, so threads that you guys think breach the rules should be closed and those which are more suited for GD or IMHO should be moved. All that’s fine and dandy. But joke answers and snark posts are left untouched and - once again, IMO - drag the quality of that forum down. As far as I’m concerned you guys should be deleting the crap replies, warning the thread pissers and keeping the threads on topic. In GQ, the attitude should be that if you don’t have an answer to the damn question then you shouldn’t bother posting.
And, yeah, it would make you the most unpopular mods on the board.
In the time I was away from the board, I hung out at MetaFilter. Ask.MetaFilter borders on GQ and IMHO territory (questions range from fixing a computer to fixing a relationship), but the moderation is strict as hell and it gains from that. To make sure that questions are actually important, members are restricted to asking one a fortnight. Answers that are shit, don’t address the question or are nowt but snark go bye-byes. It’s that strict moderation - as well as the depth of knowledge the folk answering the questions have - that made Ask.Mefi so popular and well known as a valuable resource for information.
I’ve often wondered if the experts on UseNet felt that way about Ed Zotti getting answers from them for his articles. It’s all relative, I guess.
GQ is very much still needed. It is a wealth of information.
One value for GQ that I don’t think could be duplicated in any other online source is the “critical review” response. Take something as simple as “Are dinosaurs reptiles?” Sounds like a yes/no question – and in fact the answer is, “Yes, sort of, depending on what definition you put on ‘reptile’.” But only here can you get the answer, from either a professional herpetologist or paleontologist or a well-read scholarly and interested layman, that reviews the general lines of thinking of the leading experts in the field on that or some other question, whether there is a consensus answer and what it is, and whether those who disagree are considered to have a sensible minority view or be lunatic-fringe faddists.
My recent question about the Malayo-Polynesian languages was in intent a successful attempt to tap into the expertise available here to escape the “drowning in caterpillars” feeling of getting so much detail that you cannot comprehend how it all fits together. I got that, but then the discussion veered into Sino-Tibetan languages and the general groupings of Southeast Asian languages, and furnished some serious scholarly discussion, including excursions into the speculative with the caveat that they were speculative. Quite simply, I do not believe one could have learned as much as it was possible to absorb from that thread in a well-taught college seminar on the same subjects.
The expert Dopers don’t subscribe to the far-out like some credulous feature-news reporter. But neither do they run from it to a refuge within the fortress walls of the irrefutable. Rather, they analyze the far-out and tell you both why it might be correct and why it probably isn’t. That’s a way to form perspective that is remarkably rare elsewhere, and deserves fostering.
I don’t agree that GQ should be so sterile as to prohibit some levity. As I have heard the mods say before, “We are building a community here…”. Certainly it should be obvious that an answer is not intended to be serious; we don’t want to mislead anyone, but this is not a research paper project and no one should be fined for going slightly off topic or interjecting a humorous comment. Reading responses of all colors and knowledge levels is one thing that makes this board interesting.
Definitely.
Misuse notwithstanding, this thread could have been closed after samclem 's first post.
Not that my google skills are anything to write home about but many times I have taken that route and come away less than satisfied.
And muffin , you make a great point. More than once I’ve been taken to a point of interest that never would have occurred to me on my own.
In regard to a rise in bad etiquette, I think you have to look elsewhere for that.
Kal , while I think you have a point, I don’t want to feel I’m in a classroom. When I come to the Dope I feel as though I’m coming to a bunch of buddies with a problem or a point of view and asking for their info or opinion. I’m looking for informal and friendly and I wouldn’t want anything to diminish that.
First of all, it is not the norm. It was less likely in the past; I go back to the old AOL days, and while this sort of question always existed, it has seemed to me a more frequent occurrence in the past few years. I suppose I could do a frequency analysis, but there are more important things to focus on, I think. :rolleyes:
I think the purpose of the forum is to answer the type of question I said that it should exist for (not in so many words, but I had hoped the idea got through). Questions not easily researched, answers not cut and dried, etc.
Funny how a simple opinion can get such a testy response… I wasn’t any where near as emphatic as the tuba-playing denizen. 
I’ve several times asked GQ’s that I couldn’t answer by Googling. Nice people on GQ helped me find the answers.
Try and find the answer to these questions by searching google
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we name the planets after the Roman gods … what did the Romans call them?
Did the Romans think the planets ARE gods, or what? -
People who can’t see are blind, people who cant hear are deaf, what are people with no sense of smell called?
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How do they build the underwater parts of bridges?
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Was there ever a real Sloop John B.?
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Those saloon doors that we see in cheesy Western movies, did they really exist, or are they a hollywood invention? What purpose did they serve? They wouldn’t keep out bad weather or undesirable people. How did the saloons lock up at night?
*non-Americans cannot ever become President, but are there any other countries that ever elected foreigners as their leader?
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what is the oldest man-made artifact ever found?
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Suppose I had a long stick that reaches from Earth to Proxima Centuri, and use it to tap out a message, information cannot travel faster than light, it must take years to arrive, so what happens to the stick in the meantime?
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any number divided by itself is 1, any number divided by zero is undefined, zero divided by any number is zero, what is zero/zero
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Why does the military refer to a kilometre as a Klick?
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Archimedes’ last words are often quoted as"Wait til I’ve finished my problem" right before the Roman soldier killed him … what problem was he working on?
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When seeds sprout, thet push their roots down, and their shoots up, but how does a seed know which way up is?
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why does the turntable on my microwave oven reverse direction every time I use it?
Betcha can’t find the answer to those, just by using google.
GQ is the best place I ever found for when I have a question like this.
Yeah, it seems so to me too (although not quite so far back). But given that I’ve been reading GQ most days for years, that’s just what I’d expect. Some of what was new to me then is old hat to me now. It was probably old hat to someone then and it’s probably new and stimulating to someone now.
Nothing’s like the music of your youth.
Both excellent points. One can Google and visit Wikipedia, and find factual answers after some work, but sometimes that’s not enough. Users may be looking for some insight as well; the personal experience of other Dopers, the firsthand knowledge of experts or professionals in the field, and even a bit of not-so-hard-and-fast opinion. All of these help to satisfy the poster’s curiosity in a way that a dry Wikipedia article can’t, and help to build a diverse community.
Understandably, very simple questions, such as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, can be answered with a Wikipedia search, and are inappropriate for GQ. Trolls and homework seekers are easily sniffed out. Still, I’m a bit concerned that some Dopers are too quick to use a standard “search Google/Wikipedia” response when the intent of the user may be to start a deeper discussion about the subject.
I’m also curious about tolerance for questions about sociological and anthropological subjects that may incite the “offenderati” - those regarding race, class, ethnicity, subcultures, body type/obesity, and so on. Having grown up in and lived in changing, ethnically diverse communities, I am sincerely interested in such subjects, but I’m afraid to ask about them now, for fear that I’ll look like a bigot or troll for being too curious. Such subjects were not off-limits in the Straight Dope books. How does one approach such sensitive subjects in GQ? Should they be as off-limits as asking about the third word that ends in “-gry”?
I know they’re busy, but I do think the moderators are doing a good job with GQ.
I wasn’t being testy, far from it. Wasn’t in my attitude, wasn’t even in my mind. Was certainly not my intention.
And I advocated treating people – even the clueless – with kindness. What’s testy in that?
Agreed, with the added comment that sometimes Wikipedia articles and easily-Googled information is just plain wrong–I’ve occasionally seen this on subjects in my area of expertise. The Web in general and Wiki in particular is a fine place to look for information, but you need to approach it with a bit of caution.
Also agreed. I suspect, though, that the line between “an interesting question” and “easily-Googled homework” is a bit different for different people. Particularly when you’re talking about some nuance of what might otherwise be a standard question.