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I wanted to highlight a part of badp's answer, as I think it's really important:

If a question can be easily answered by Google, don't just stop at the first hit. Dig deeper, look into the matter, do some science. Write something original, show us the money.

Not doing this, I think, is why people get annoyed with the "Googled" answers: they're kind of thoughtless and in some ways condescending: "eh, you could've spent 30 seconds Googling it yourself like I did and answered your own question. Dummy."

I wish the people who do go for the Googled answers assumed good faith more often, or assumed the original poster isn't completely incompetent and already considered the obvious answer. If the answer was so easy to find, why was the question asked at all?

I don't really know why people don't do that more often: I think maybe—given some of the contests we've had recently—people think a fast answer is better than a thoughtful one. For urgent situations, yeah, I suppose that's true.

But gaming is a recreational activity: it's not mission critical for most people. And what sets Gaming.SE apart from our competitors—stuff like GameFAQs's answers board and Yahoo! Answers—is the level of thought and science we put into our best answers. We should be emphasizing—and insisting—on that level of quality for all our answers, not just a small subset.

So right isn't the bar we want to hit: useful is. Did the internet just get a bit better with an answer? Will someone see that answer, having read the content on GameFAQs or Yahoo! Answers, and say "wow, that's interesting!"?

If not, and all we're doing is shuffling bits around between the dozen or so gaming help sites by copying answers, is all this really worth it?

I wanted to highlight a part of badp's answer, as I think it's really important:

If a question can be easily answered by Google, don't just stop at the first hit. Dig deeper, look into the matter, do some science. Write something original, show us the money.

Not doing this, I think, is why people get annoyed with the "Googled" answers: they're kind of thoughtless and in some ways condescending: "eh, you could've spent 30 seconds Googling it yourself like I did and answered your own question. Dummy."

I wish the people who do go for the Googled answers assumed good faith more often, or assumed the original poster isn't completely incompetent and already considered the obvious answer. If the answer was so easy to find, why was the question asked at all?

I don't really know why people don't do that more often: I think maybe—given some of the contests we've had recently—people think a fast answer is better than a thoughtful one. For urgent situations, yeah, I suppose that's true.

But gaming is a recreational activity: it's not mission critical for most people. And what sets Gaming.SE apart from our competitors—stuff like GameFAQs's answers board and Yahoo! Answers—is the level of thought and science we put into our best answers. We should be emphasizing—and insisting—on that level of quality for all our answers, not just a small subset.

So right isn't the bar we want to hit: useful is. Did the internet just get a bit better with an answer? Will someone see that answer, having read the content on GameFAQs or Yahoo! Answers, and say "wow, that's interesting!"?

If not, and all we're doing is shuffling bits around between the dozen or so gaming help sites by copying answers, is all this really worth it?