Why? It's often a good idea to google for an answer. See the second result for "number of gas stations in the us", for example:

http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/number-gas-stations-us-1995...

If you want the candidate to show his reasoning abilities by making good guesses based on reasonable assumptions, you should tell him to do so beforehand.

What do you do when you come across a simple fact that you need to know in order to continue?

If I were interviewing a candidate, I wouldn't ask pointless questions about "simple facts." I would ask about design methods and give small design problems.

I'm a hardware engineer. As shocking as this may be to some, much of what I need to know cannot be easily found on the internet. I have to crack open a book to find good high level information. With the rising popularity of open college classes, this will probably change, but we aren't there yet.

For programming, the internet can be a very good resource. When I was a full-time programmer, google served as a very good reference. I would open a browser before I took a look at my bookshelf.

I dunno, I know people who's problem-solving skills amount to "paste the error message into Google and try the first solution". I want people who can derive a solution from first principles because often that's what you need to do.

Pasting error messages in Google saved my ass a few times.

It is not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but it can't be all you got.

Of course not. Its just fast and in many(mostly trivial and boring) cases the problem is already solved. Lets just say that sometimes its a better idea to just google for something instead of trying to figure it all out and in some cases-reinvent the wheel.

I'm just the opposite.

I want practical, get the job done type people.

I don't want cowboys who are more interested in clever solutions and/or impressing others with their knowledge, "obvious" intelligence, or skillz.

I certainly don't want some douche sitting in his chair theorizing from first principals when they could have googled the answer or asked team mate for help.

Finally the era when what one knows was self-contained in their heads is over. My memory and knowledge are huge and they are kept in google and wikipedia.

I would be surprised by the amount of people who have the intuition to actually go to Google in the first place. It's a lot better than a "Hmm, I don't know--how many?"

It shows that someone is willing to go and seek out the answer on their own.

I guess this makes sense, if you're hiring for Yahoo! Search.