Here's the thing: You need to know what to look for.

You can't just google "The internet won't work" or "blue screen help" or "I can't see files".

Web search is a super powerful tool but it requires some fundamental knowledge before it can help.

Actually reading error messages is an apparently very rare skill. Almost always, if you just google what it tells you, you'll hit something... Yet I constantly see people automatically click through popups milliseconds after they appear, only to fume about things not working. It takes a surprising amount of effort to get them to do it over and slow down long enough to figure out what went wrong.

i would just like to get error messages that actually said something more than something went wrong. yea, no shit something went wrong, i already know that, but what and why and how do i fix it are questions i want answered. i know the code knows what went wrong, so just tell me.

Why i love the older parts of Linux, but hate the more recent DE centric stuff. Because the older, unix derived, stuff will tell you front and center what went wrong (unless it is so wrong that all the kernel can do is barf a hex dump of the memory region on screen).

The newer stuff will come up with unhelpful messages or just an eternally spinning pointer, and yet they are supposedly bringing Linux to the desktop. F that.

And i wonder how many times now i have fed a Windows error code into a search term and found a bunch of people asking all manner of channels (both Microsoft and otherwise) for help and get nothing (W10 don't like the card reader on a tablet i have, and all i can find is that maybe, just maybe, MS screwed up the driver. But Intel seems to no longer provide any usable chipset bundle...).

I confess, I was very guilty of that at my old job, which was very fast paced. Whenever reflexively closing the pop up resulted in things not going as I expected, I would, indeed, do it over, slow down and carefully read the messages.

IME, you usually can just google things like that and as long as you're willing to read through the first ~5 results to see if the situation is similar to yours, you'll very often find the solution to your problem.

I used to be a teaching assistant for a programming class at a top university, and it was astounding how often my students' issues could be solved by simply copy/pasting the error message into Google.

It seemed like most of my students were often so intimidated by the scary red error text that they didn't even try to solve it themselves, they just gave up and assumed it was unfixable. About halfway through my semester I reached a breaking point and spent an entire lecture where I had a list of previous emails from students asking for help, copy/pasted their questions verbatim into Google search, and showed how often the solution was found within the first few search results.

The skill is being able to solve the issues with the help of google. A skill many lack.