Google it!

I don't like it when people tell me to use Google when I ask a question.  By saying this you don't encourage me or anyone else to go and solve their own problems, you just encourage people not to talk to you.  "Google it" is one of the most unhelpful things you can say.  For one, often the main reason someone asks you in the first place rather than just googling it is because they want someone to explain it and they regard you as someone knowledgeable of the field or someone who they think might know and understand the answer, there's a difference between finding an answer and understanding it.

There are a lot of teachers that don't seem to grasp this concept, nowhere is this more evident than at University.  During my time at University there were a number of lecturers who gave this response, there was one in particular who more or less, every response they gave was "google it" - no, this University charges £3,000 [now £9,000 - that's $13,500] a year in "tuition" fees - you fucking explain the problem don't tell your students to "google it" - google is not an explanation.  You're essentially saying "pay me for a service I don't actually provide".

Beyond University however this mentality still persists.  In academia and in life when I am confronted with a person who responds like this I will stop talking to you period.  If we lived in a society where we simply didn't answer any question at all that the answer to could be found online we would very quickly descend into a level of existence where we don't communicate with one another.

More than this, there's the issue of discussion to be considered, knowing and understanding the answer isn't the end of the matter, contemplation comes next, and by extension derivation of new knowledge and ideas based on what we know and what we could add.  Discussion of ideas is integral to human growth, knowing the answer and understanding it should not mean that you do not continue to ask questions, if you did stop you would be accepting blind faith - I hear the answer, the explanation seems reasonable, I won't bother questioning this any further, I'll just accept it.  That's quite a dangerous mentality as it makes you easily manipulated.  If your "depth of questioning" is known, then in order to make you believe a complex lie the author only needs to prepare enough evidence to convince you of that depth. 

"Google it" encourages shallow thinking there are various aspects of Google that highlight this, including but not limited to the number of pages of search results you're willing to sift through.  Anyone who uses Google for the first time soon learns to accept the idea that "The answer will be on the first page or maybe the second, if it's not then change the search term" - everything else is irrelevant.  Don't look deeper, don't question or explore further, you asked a question you just want the answer and nothing else.

The rise of sites like wikipedia feed this mentality, even to the point where many google searches return the wikipedia article for that term as the top result, yet the number of people beyond academia who would actually pursue the citation sources in a wikipedia article is minute - I know this because the number of times I have clicked a citation link to find a 404 page or a parked domain is quite high.  People accept what they see at face value and don't explore deeper.  I say beyond academia in this context because within academia you are discouraged from using wikipedia as a source - do people stop using it?  No, they still use it, they just use the citation links as sources instead, and when you reach a 404 or a parked domain you just look for another article or google it.