I’ve never understood the board’s policy in requesting search engine use before posting a question in GD. Lots of us read GD in order to learn the answers to the questions that get posted there. Where’s the ignorance-fighting to be found in questions and answers that never get posted?
And it’s not unusual that SDMB threads show up high in Google search results. Do you guys have special juice at Google? (Hey, nobody knows who Cecil really is, right? Maybe he’s one of the Google founders. )
Assuming you meant GQ, using Google or Wiki first doesn’t preclude starting a thread about it, just that the questions you end up asking may be at a deeper level and hence more interesting. Once you’ve got the basic information, that may lead to follow-up questions. And even if they don’t, you can post a thread in MPSIMS to share whatever interesting information you just found out.
What a shocker. We may need to call this Presidente’s Law: A poster that rips the low quality of posts on a another forum typically contributes little themselves.
I’m with you on this. There have been lots of times when I’ve scanned through the from page of GQ and thought “Hmm, I’ve never really thought about that. Wonder what the answer is?”
Even if the answer is Googlable, if I never thought to ask the question, I’d not know the answer.
I like that The Dope has more threads going in all its myriad forums than I have time to read.
That means I give myself permission to skim and skip ANY thread that doesn’t look interesting, or could easily turn into a nitpick-fest, OR could have been easily googled.
Unless the easily-Googled answer will be much more exciting in GQ… (Google jes’ ain’t that witty).
I just checked it, and it doesn’t work again. I guess search results must be dynamic, so the link doesn’t work after a time. In any case, anyone interested can find the threads using the search function.
Apparently the OP doesn’t want to even try this simple problem because you can’t google many problems that seem simple a first glance. Asking how long the coastline of Maine is is unanswerable. It is the classic coastline problem as described by Lewis Fry Richardson and means that the coastline gets longer and longer as you walk it in finer detail. At the extreme, it theoretically grows to be infinite. This realization is one of the things that led to the discovery of fractal geometry.
This isn’t the answer that a couple in an RV wants posted on a retiree travel site but it is the type of answer that makes even simple questions here become interesting. The hikers in question never said if they wanted to just walk down the roads following the coast or follow every nook and cranny so the distance could be anything past past your minimum numbers.