I personally find Google often very difficult – out of 2,981,437 hits, how do I know which are reliable? And there are (believe it or not) newcomers to the internet who really don’t know how to use Google, or Wikipedia, etc. I have a cousin, she’s 70, she uses email just fine (pretty much) but she gets confused by some other interenet activities.
When I answer Cecil’s mail, you’d be amazed how many emails come in that ask a question that can be found by searching the Straight Dope Archives. I just respond by saying, “Cecil already answered that, here’s a link… and by the way, you can find this and many other interesting things yourself by searching our Archives.”
So, I don’t think it’s necessarily snarky to tell people where to find an answer. Sometimes, I think it’s satisfactory to say, “You can look that up in any reasonable dictionary” thus telling people how to find an answer.