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Not eveone is stupid; some people are lazy :-\
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Joshua Boniface
Joshua Boniface
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I'd disagree as well, but for a different reason than Michael Hampton suggests (though I agree with all of that).

This is a rant I've typed up many times, but never shared because it never seemed on-topic. Well, in this thread, it is on topic!

I consider these type of questions (the "Help Vampire" type) to be a bane and disease on the Web. So much so, that I've even come to hate Google for even indexing them.

These questions come, in their endless repetition, and each one has a slightly different answer by someone different. That alone isn't the problem; the problem is that Google, and the other search engines, index these endless, duplicate posts about tier 1 issues, and suddenly you can't get a meaningful result from search engines without digging through over a decade of the same crap over and over.

I'll give an generalized example of what I mean.

I come across an annoying problem; I'm knowledgeable enough (in my day job, I'm a tier 3 sysadmin) to have tried some of the more obvious solutions, but I'm still stumped. Maybe there's a quirk, or a differing configuration, or something, but the stock two-second answer just doesn't cut it.

So I head to Google. Now, my Google-fu is not the best, but I craft up a decent query about my problem. And I hit search.

And then I'm greeted with page after page of the same question, and the same stupid tier 1 answer, from blog after blog after forum after SE site.

Sometimes I might get one that's both current (and I define this as 3 years, but even that is too long for some questions/problems) and matches my problem. But of course, due to the aforementioned Help Vampire-type posts and the fatigue they cause, the newer questions don't have a reasonable answer. Or perhaps someone 5 years ago (and keep in mind, that means twenty-freaking-TEN, practically yesterday in terms of Google results) ran into the same quirk I did, but the one answer doesn't work due to [older software/different software/another problem]. And if I want to comment in that thread on a random forum from 5 years ago because I truly think it might be relevant? Well, that's "necroposting", and for reasons that I have seriously, in my 15+ years on the web, never understood, that's considered bad.

Now, I realize that this is a general rant, and frankly in my experience it applies more often to crappy blogs and forums that just reblog and repost the same garbage across the Internet, yielding two pages of results that all say the same thing.

But Stack Exchange is huge. And it's indexed. So the more crap that is allowed to remain; not just bad questions, but also bad and lazy and repetitive answers; the more we end up with search engines polluted by junk answers that don't actually help anybody.

We're in 2015. We've had over 15 years of Google. 15 years of old blog posts and forums and cruft. That alone is bad enough; we don't need to pollute our precious search engines with even more crap because stupid and/or lazy people can't do their own research.

/rant

I'd disagree as well, but for a different reason than Michael Hampton suggests (though I agree with all of that).

This is a rant I've typed up many times, but never shared because it never seemed on-topic. Well, in this thread, it is on topic!

I consider these type of questions (the "Help Vampire" type) to be a bane and disease on the Web. So much so, that I've even come to hate Google for even indexing them.

These questions come, in their endless repetition, and each one has a slightly different answer by someone different. That alone isn't the problem; the problem is that Google, and the other search engines, index these endless, duplicate posts about tier 1 issues, and suddenly you can't get a meaningful result from search engines without digging through over a decade of the same crap over and over.

I'll give an generalized example of what I mean.

I come across an annoying problem; I'm knowledgeable enough (in my day job, I'm a tier 3 sysadmin) to have tried some of the more obvious solutions, but I'm still stumped. Maybe there's a quirk, or a differing configuration, or something, but the stock two-second answer just doesn't cut it.

So I head to Google. Now, my Google-fu is not the best, but I craft up a decent query about my problem. And I hit search.

And then I'm greeted with page after page of the same question, and the same stupid tier 1 answer, from blog after blog after forum after SE site.

Sometimes I might get one that's both current (and I define this as 3 years, but even that is too long for some questions/problems) and matches my problem. But of course, due to the aforementioned Help Vampire-type posts and the fatigue they cause, the newer questions don't have a reasonable answer. Or perhaps someone 5 years ago (and keep in mind, that means twenty-freaking-TEN, practically yesterday in terms of Google results) ran into the same quirk I did, but the one answer doesn't work due to [older software/different software/another problem]. And if I want to comment in that thread on a random forum from 5 years ago because I truly think it might be relevant? Well, that's "necroposting", and for reasons that I have seriously, in my 15+ years on the web, never understood, that's considered bad.

Now, I realize that this is a general rant, and frankly in my experience it applies more often to crappy blogs and forums that just reblog and repost the same garbage across the Internet, yielding two pages of results that all say the same thing.

But Stack Exchange is huge. And it's indexed. So the more crap that is allowed to remain; not just bad questions, but also bad and lazy and repetitive answers; the more we end up with search engines polluted by junk answers that don't actually help anybody.

We're in 2015. We've had over 15 years of Google. 15 years of old blog posts and forums and cruft. That alone is bad enough; we don't need to pollute our precious search engines with even more crap because stupid people can't do their own research.

/rant

I'd disagree as well, but for a different reason than Michael Hampton suggests (though I agree with all of that).

This is a rant I've typed up many times, but never shared because it never seemed on-topic. Well, in this thread, it is on topic!

I consider these type of questions (the "Help Vampire" type) to be a bane and disease on the Web. So much so, that I've even come to hate Google for even indexing them.

These questions come, in their endless repetition, and each one has a slightly different answer by someone different. That alone isn't the problem; the problem is that Google, and the other search engines, index these endless, duplicate posts about tier 1 issues, and suddenly you can't get a meaningful result from search engines without digging through over a decade of the same crap over and over.

I'll give an generalized example of what I mean.

I come across an annoying problem; I'm knowledgeable enough (in my day job, I'm a tier 3 sysadmin) to have tried some of the more obvious solutions, but I'm still stumped. Maybe there's a quirk, or a differing configuration, or something, but the stock two-second answer just doesn't cut it.

So I head to Google. Now, my Google-fu is not the best, but I craft up a decent query about my problem. And I hit search.

And then I'm greeted with page after page of the same question, and the same stupid tier 1 answer, from blog after blog after forum after SE site.

Sometimes I might get one that's both current (and I define this as 3 years, but even that is too long for some questions/problems) and matches my problem. But of course, due to the aforementioned Help Vampire-type posts and the fatigue they cause, the newer questions don't have a reasonable answer. Or perhaps someone 5 years ago (and keep in mind, that means twenty-freaking-TEN, practically yesterday in terms of Google results) ran into the same quirk I did, but the one answer doesn't work due to [older software/different software/another problem]. And if I want to comment in that thread on a random forum from 5 years ago because I truly think it might be relevant? Well, that's "necroposting", and for reasons that I have seriously, in my 15+ years on the web, never understood, that's considered bad.

Now, I realize that this is a general rant, and frankly in my experience it applies more often to crappy blogs and forums that just reblog and repost the same garbage across the Internet, yielding two pages of results that all say the same thing.

But Stack Exchange is huge. And it's indexed. So the more crap that is allowed to remain; not just bad questions, but also bad and lazy and repetitive answers; the more we end up with search engines polluted by junk answers that don't actually help anybody.

We're in 2015. We've had over 15 years of Google. 15 years of old blog posts and forums and cruft. That alone is bad enough; we don't need to pollute our precious search engines with even more crap because stupid and/or lazy people can't do their own research.

/rant

Source Link
Joshua Boniface
Joshua Boniface
  • 376
  • 1
  • 5

I'd disagree as well, but for a different reason than Michael Hampton suggests (though I agree with all of that).

This is a rant I've typed up many times, but never shared because it never seemed on-topic. Well, in this thread, it is on topic!

I consider these type of questions (the "Help Vampire" type) to be a bane and disease on the Web. So much so, that I've even come to hate Google for even indexing them.

These questions come, in their endless repetition, and each one has a slightly different answer by someone different. That alone isn't the problem; the problem is that Google, and the other search engines, index these endless, duplicate posts about tier 1 issues, and suddenly you can't get a meaningful result from search engines without digging through over a decade of the same crap over and over.

I'll give an generalized example of what I mean.

I come across an annoying problem; I'm knowledgeable enough (in my day job, I'm a tier 3 sysadmin) to have tried some of the more obvious solutions, but I'm still stumped. Maybe there's a quirk, or a differing configuration, or something, but the stock two-second answer just doesn't cut it.

So I head to Google. Now, my Google-fu is not the best, but I craft up a decent query about my problem. And I hit search.

And then I'm greeted with page after page of the same question, and the same stupid tier 1 answer, from blog after blog after forum after SE site.

Sometimes I might get one that's both current (and I define this as 3 years, but even that is too long for some questions/problems) and matches my problem. But of course, due to the aforementioned Help Vampire-type posts and the fatigue they cause, the newer questions don't have a reasonable answer. Or perhaps someone 5 years ago (and keep in mind, that means twenty-freaking-TEN, practically yesterday in terms of Google results) ran into the same quirk I did, but the one answer doesn't work due to [older software/different software/another problem]. And if I want to comment in that thread on a random forum from 5 years ago because I truly think it might be relevant? Well, that's "necroposting", and for reasons that I have seriously, in my 15+ years on the web, never understood, that's considered bad.

Now, I realize that this is a general rant, and frankly in my experience it applies more often to crappy blogs and forums that just reblog and repost the same garbage across the Internet, yielding two pages of results that all say the same thing.

But Stack Exchange is huge. And it's indexed. So the more crap that is allowed to remain; not just bad questions, but also bad and lazy and repetitive answers; the more we end up with search engines polluted by junk answers that don't actually help anybody.

We're in 2015. We've had over 15 years of Google. 15 years of old blog posts and forums and cruft. That alone is bad enough; we don't need to pollute our precious search engines with even more crap because stupid people can't do their own research.

/rant