google links

[Sue Meng]

Do you think others stupid and put Google links. Everybody google now a days.

[Jim Yingst]

I don't know what you're responding to here, but I do sometimes post Google links for others. Some people apparently do need reminders that the resource exists; I don't know why. Here at JavaRanch often the problem seems to be that people want an answer explained directly to them, rather than taking the time to go find the answer. Of course for those of us posting answers, it's much easier to post links to existing explanations. When I post Google links, I have also looked at the first few results, and determined that they are likely to be useful to the questioner. And I may have used search terms that the original questioner may not have thought of. Plus, often a question is very ague and/or general, so it's not worthwhile to spend much time on the answer until they focus their question better.

[Ben Souther]

Google (like a dictionary) is great for finding resources for a given term.
When you don't know the name for something, however, a little help from someone else can speed things up greatly.

For instance, we get a lot of people asking how to create an image with with random numbers and letters for verification purposes. If they already knew that the term for this is "captcha" it would be easy for them to look it up.
When this comes in I will either tell them to do a search on that term or, simply post a Google link like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=captcha&btnG=Google+Search

[Sue Meng]

Yeh, but shouldn't people be searching first and then ask. Any way I was referring to some of the threads (general discussion not questions) where its (links) been overused a bit. Same goes with wiki links as well.

[Jesper de Jong]

They should, but not everybody gets the idea to do a Google search first...

I think there's nothing wrong in telling someone nicely and gently: "Try searching for X and Y on Google, and you'll find for example this: ...".

As long as you don't break JavaRanch's Be Nice rule.