Search, where art thou?

This blog started as a result of me encountering one of the most frequently asked questions on a photography forum, for what felt like the thousandth time. If you regularly visit some of the consumer oriented forums you’ll find certain questions arise, with excruciating predictability, several times each week.

This continues to puzzle me: with apparently no expenditure of effort on their part, at all, someone expects a complete stranger to give up their time answering a question that has been asked, and answered, many times before. Often many times within the last few days.

How does this thought process work? The forum features clear instructions to anyone starting a new thread to use the search to see if their question has arisen before, but they ignore that. Some complain that there are simply too many messages to read, that’s it’s too hard to find an answer. Because everyone keeps asking the same bloody questions over and over again!

In many cases merely typing the title of their post into a Google search box would yield a workable answer within the first 3 results, but even that is apparently too much to ask.

What, ultimately, will become the fate of forums if this continues? Will there inevitably be an evolutionary process where those seeking knowledge gain it, share it, become frustrated and leave – at an ever increasing pace?