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: - There is no guarantee the Googled answer is right. I've seen one of the major Google answer people give a wrong answer before. I don't personally buy into this one. There is no guarantee that **any** answer, Googled or otherwise, is right. Incorrect answers that receive upvotes are a problem, but I don't think Google is the cause. - 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. My experience as a reader and [contributor][1] to GameFAQs is exactly the opposite... most authors don't mind if you copy their work so long as you aren't trying to make money off it. But that specific example aside, I don't know enough about this issue to know if legally it's a real problem or not. - "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. Every answer risks suffering from answer rot. Googling aside, does this mean I shouldn't leave an answer on the site if I don't think I'll be around a month, year, or decade from now to correct it myself? Am I responsible for maintaining and updating every answer I leave, for all of time? There are already tools in place to combat this problem. - 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. And here's the meat of it. If someone literally knows nothing about the game and slaps the first thing they find on Google as an answer, then yes, that can be a problem, particularly if what they cut & paste looks good, which will tend to give it upvotes, correct or not. But how often is this really the case? I've answered [quite][2] [a][3] [few][4] [tag:swtor] [questions][5] that were a combination of my personal experience with the game along with researched (a.k.a., Googled) knowledge. So I think this is definitely a problem if the answerer doesn't have enough experience to even know if the answer is correct or not. However, I still don't buy into the "they won't know if the answer changes later" portion of the argument. For me, the issue really comes down to whether or not the answer is correct and well-written, not where it came from. The community has tools in place to deal with out of date answers and incorrect answers, regardless of their source. [1]: http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/970127-serious-sam-hd-the-first-encounter/faqs/58369 [2]: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/46478/3062 [3]: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/45731/3062 [4]: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/43889/3062 [5]: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/43491/3062