COLUMN: Google This ...
It's getting to the day and age where people need to realize that a majority of their technology questions can be routed to a search engine rather than putting them off on other people.
I'm writing this as an IT major and someone who takes care of people's Mac and PC issues on a daily basis, about a quarter of which can be avoided if people took the incentive to do research before asking for my help.
I've lost count of the amount of times that people have asked me something that someone can pull up through a search engine using three words in under 15 seconds, yet they're content on waiting 10 minutes for someone to search up the same things they have access to.
Just today I had a co-worker ask me how to blend layers in Photoshop and, rather than doing the work for them, I told them what to search and sent them a direct link to four step by step tutorials on how to do it.
Learning to use search engines these days is an important life skill that has saved me a good amount of time, and taught me a fair amount as well.
Case in point, you didn't pay attention in class that one time when the professor was discussing the necessity of knowing Cisco routing commands and you forgot to take notes? Off to a search engine and typing "Cisco routing commands" when you get back from class brings up Cisco's website, listing the commands and two PDFs with full documentation on how to do it.
It's worth noting that this doesn't solve all issues, I've run into some roadblocks with calculus and a few journalism courses, but more often than not I've taken to this method rather than buying books for classes. Need be, if I can't find it online, which is a rarity, then it's likely they have a copy of the book in the library to check out.
Honestly, it's getting to the point where I believe in 10 to 15 years we'll see search engines overtaking higher education in some areas. When you can learn anything, not literally anything but really close, through searching the Internet and reading while following along, the only difference between Google and a college is a degree.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that as of right now using Bing, Google or Yahoo is going to solve all problems 100 percent of the time, but it will at least get you headed in the right direction.
