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Comment by kawsper | Hacker News Reader

Using search engines sometimes feel like a lost art if you spend any time in Facebook groups, where people will ask mundande, simple, and easily Googleable questions.

Sometimes I wonder if people do it to fill some sort of social need, and don't particularly care for the answer.

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HN seriously overestimates the technical capabilities of the average person.

Facebook now has enough reach that it includes many people who don't know how to use technology properly. Finding an answer through Google takes a little bit of skill to frame the question and pick the result that will give you the answer.

Roughly 70% of adult Americans use Facebook [1]. This study [2] is from 2015, but it says that only a third of America adults are capable of medium-difficulty technical tasks, such as tasks where you need to '[evaluate] the relevance of a set of items to discard distractors'.

Remember, 20% of American adults have below basic or no literacy skills [3], which means they are not capable of tasks such as:

- "using a television guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time"

- "comparing the ticket prices for two events" [4]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about...

[2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

[3] http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/literacy-all-adult-liter...

[4] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp

In my experience, people don't even think that's an option. It's like you either know how to do things or you ask an actual person.

To be fair, in some cases it's just laziness.

How is googling something not the lazy option though? Personally, I think it's far more work to ask someone and wait for the answer over immediately getting the answer from searching and finding a 4 year old forum post with the same question.

Tell that to my dad. He just picks up the phone and asks me why the printer is not working. On an OS I don't even know how to use, for that matter.

Also remember, I can find a vastly greater breath of information cause I can search in English. He can't. Now that I think of it, this may even be a counterpoint to "just Google it".

Don't worry, my parents still call me for things like that, and they don't even have the excuse of being non-english speakers. I will say, if you have the time, set your folks up with something like Linux mint: my step-dad somehow mahaged to get malware on a Mac, and it's much easier for me to keep an identical Mint VM around so I can walk him through everything screen-by-screen. Honestly, setting up their new printer was harder on my mom's Win10 machine, which greatly surprised me.

Asking someone skips the tedious work of filtering applicable solutions from 20+ years of forum posts, memes and SEO shitfarms in exchange for an actual-but-delayed answer.

As I get older I have less time or patience for it myself. The effort required increases with the amount of content available on the internet. Some people just aren't good at research in the first place.

Important to note that most of us have had years of practice searching for stuff online, and we're very good at identifying this garbage. You can't reasonably expect someone to just hop on to Google and know what to type, which links/sites to avoid, how to spot trolling, and so on.

. . and if you tell them that you found the answer just by googling it, you're the a-hole.

Before the age of the internet, when someone didn’t know something they would first ask their family or friends for the meaning and if nobody would know or weren’t really sure, they then would open the encyclopedia, or move on to the next thing. It feels more naturels to ask someone first than googling for it, maybe it’s the social aspect of humans, but it could also be laziness, but googling things is definitely a skill that can be improved upon

For all the people who replied to this supporting the "social need" view - there are enough unGoogleable questions you can draw a conversation around.

Also, giving people a signal that you're lazy or view them as a resource to exploit is an awful way to start a conversation.

Any given community's patience is, unfortunately, subject to the tragedy of the commons.

I can be both. I arrested myself typing out a “let me google that for you” reply on a small social network years ago. I realized doing that stops a conversation dead in its tracks. And sometimes people just want to have a conversation.

Agreed. I often just want the answer but for a lot of people it’s about the interaction, not the solution.

Also, sometimes it is about the solution plus the social proof that they are assessing the solution correctly.

Also, google isn't that great at telling you when you are asking the wrong question.

We have simple norm at work lunch - no googling for answers! It does make conversation better.

The intellectual fidelity on Facebook may be a symptom of the non-linear presentation of posts.

It is like organizing a library, by dumping all the books into a pile. It increases engagement at the expense of efficiently finding information.

Every Google search you do is a lost opportunity for an unexpected conversation. Imagine never meeting a wife because you did a Google search instead.

Also imagine meeting your wife because you did a search query. Since we're in a purely hypothetical plane, both of these are equally plausible.

That doesn't make any intuitive sense.

Meeting people starts with conversations.

Not the way I do it.

How do u do it?

Searching an answer to your question on the internet doesn't mean you're not talking about it to someone else.

By your logic, we'd literally be silent 99% of the time, because 'we have all the answers,' which is nonsense.

Imagine never meeting a wife because you used a self-checkout, pumped your own gas, drove a car instead of taking an Uber, read a FAQ instead of calling customer support, watched TV instead attending local theater, played Minesweeper instead of Fortnite, or commented on Hacker News instead of going speed-dating.

Coding is the one place I think you are correct.

Most information is extremely niche, but Coding is all over the internet.

I have not been able to google some of my (Industry Level) Chemistry questions.

In some cases they may feel it's whether they are asking the right question - but I agree that people searching for themselves is often a better practice

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