I actually feel some pity for people who, because answers were once hard to find, never got in the habit of looking for them. A mystery can be exciting and magical, or it can be intimidating. You remember the magic and excitement because that's the kind of person you were. Others came to the conclusion that curiosity about certain things was pointless, because their odds of finding an answer were so low. These are the people who get stumped by easily-googlable questions because it simply never occurs to them to google, or the people who don't try to plug in a DVD player because the cables look so complicated, even though they aren't really. I get the sense that there used to be more of these people back before information became so easy to find.

(A broader point here is that you're a sample containing one person, and probably an outlier in many ways. Be careful when generalizing from yourself.)

No, now you google and if you don't find a good answer you post to yahoo answers/stackexchange and start a discussion with other folks who are experiencing the same issues (or experts in that topic).

Eventually this gets indexed and google's capabilities to answer increase.

Yahoo Answers. Amazing. Have you recently visited their Programming & Design section? How does that community survive?

Yahoo Answers... you mean the College Student Health Care Plan?

...just because it's not for you, doesn't mean it's (totally) useless.

It's still, quietly, the best place for what it does. Much like a lot of Yahoo.

This sums it up: http://cdn-www.cracked.com/articleimages/ob/4052532525_0a2c9...

Not all questions are programming questions. For non-programming questions (ie, baby health questions), it does ok.

I use Google to find yahoo answers.