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Over on the nominations page, one of the nominations has a large comment discussion about this. Some of us have been hoping that the person who originally brought up the concern would bring the discussion to meta, but it doesn't look like that's going to be happening, and it seems worth discussing not only on its own merit, but because one particular nominee has received some negative attention over the issue.

The question is, are Googled answers a problem for StackExchange? The issues I've seen listed are:

1. There is no guarantee the Googled answer is right. I've seen one of the major Google answer people give a wrong answer before.

2. There is no guarantee that the site the answer was found on has a license permitting the content to be used here. People who write FAQs for GameFAQs tends to explicitly forbid this sort of thing.

3. "Google answers" suffer from "answer rot." Similar to "link rot," "answer rot" is when the answer becomes wrong but is never fixed. A Google answer to a world-of-warcraft question could be wrong as of any update. Every question asking about quests or leveling paths in WoW were made wrong by the releast of the Cataclysm expansion in December 2010, due to major changes to the game's zones and game mechanics. I understand something like this also happened in the more recent versions of minecraft. Since people who post Google answers don't know the games, they also don't know when the game changes, let alone if those changes invalidate their answers.

Points 1-3 written by Powerlord on his Gaming profile page.

Over on the nominations page, one of the nominations has a large comment discussion about this. Some of us have been hoping that the person who originally brought up the concern would bring the discussion to meta, but it doesn't look like that's going to be happening, and it seems worth discussing not only on its own merit, but because one particular nominee has received some negative attention over the issue.

The question is, are Googled answers a problem for StackExchange? The issues I've seen listed are:

1. There is no guarantee the Googled answer is right. I've seen one of the major Google answer people give a wrong answer before.

2. There is no guarantee that the site the answer was found on has a license permitting the content to be used here. People who write FAQs for GameFAQs tends to explicitly forbid this sort of thing.

3. "Google answers" suffer from "answer rot." Similar to "link rot," "answer rot" is when the answer becomes wrong but is never fixed. A Google answer to a world-of-warcraft question could be wrong as of any update. Every question asking about quests or leveling paths in WoW were made wrong by the releast of the Cataclysm expansion in December 2010, due to major changes to the game's zones and game mechanics. I understand something like this also happened in the more recent versions of minecraft. Since people who post Google answers don't know the games, they also don't know when the game changes, let alone if those changes invalidate their answers.

Points 1-3 originally written by Powerlord.

Over on the nominations page, one of the nominations has a large comment discussion about this. Some of us have been hoping that the person who originally brought up the concern would bring the discussion to meta, but it doesn't look like that's going to be happening, and it seems worth discussing not only on its own merit, but because one particular nominee has received some negative attention over the issue.

The question is, are Googled answers a problem for StackExchange? The issues I've seen listed are:

1. There is no guarantee the Googled answer is right. I've seen one of the major Google answer people give a wrong answer before.

2. There is no guarantee that the site the answer was found on has a license permitting the content to be used here. People who write FAQs for GameFAQs tends to explicitly forbid this sort of thing.

3. "Google answers" suffer from "answer rot." Similar to "link rot," "answer rot" is when the answer becomes wrong but is never fixed. A Google answer to a world-of-warcraft question could be wrong as of any update. Every question asking about quests or leveling paths in WoW were made wrong by the releast of the Cataclysm expansion in December 2010, due to major changes to the game's zones and game mechanics. I understand something like this also happened in the more recent versions of minecraft.

4.   Since people who post Google answers don't know the games, they also don't know when the game changes, let alone if those changes invalidate their answers.

Points 1-3 written by Powerlord on his Gaming profile page.

Over on the nominations page, one of the nominations has a large comment discussion about this. Some of us have been hoping that the person who originally brought up the concern would bring the discussion to meta, but it doesn't look like that's going to be happening, and it seems worth discussing not only on its own merit, but because one particular nominee has received some negative attention over the issue.

The question is, are Googled answers a problem for StackExchange? The issues I've seen listed are:

1. There is no guarantee the Googled answer is right. I've seen one of the major Google answer people give a wrong answer before.

2. There is no guarantee that the site the answer was found on has a license permitting the content to be used here. People who write FAQs for GameFAQs tends to explicitly forbid this sort of thing.

3. "Google answers" suffer from "answer rot." Similar to "link rot," "answer rot" is when the answer becomes wrong but is never fixed. A Google answer to a world-of-warcraft question could be wrong as of any update. Every question asking about quests or leveling paths in WoW were made wrong by the releast of the Cataclysm expansion in December 2010, due to major changes to the game's zones and game mechanics. I understand something like this also happened in the more recent versions of minecraft. Since people who post Google answers don't know the games, they also don't know when the game changes, let alone if those changes invalidate their answers.

Points 1-3 written by Powerlord on his Gaming profile page.