Stack Overflow
I have found a new favorite site. Stack Overflow. This is a great site for programming related Q&A. I highly recommend this to anyone even vaguely interested in programming at any level.
I have noticed an interesting phenomenon however. One of the goals of the site creators (Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky) was to make it a central sort of repository for google discovery. What I am noticing is happening however is that it is sort of becoming a wrapper for google. I am sure that often what happens is that someone asks a question and the accepted answer is a link with a brief description of what the link is about. I suspect that a lot of the time that link was found via google. So essentially what has happened is that the asker really asked “Here is what I would like to search google for, but I’m not sure what the right search terms are. Could someone help me”. Then someone with a little more knowledge of the terminology in the problem space does a search and returns what they classify as the top answer. I think this is a useful solution flow, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to help the asker learn what search would have worked rather than answering the question that they explicitly asked.
Regardless it is a great site and I suggest that everyone check it out.
Ebgreen's Weblog 
October 22, 2008 at 5:25 am
Unfortunately a lot of programmers don’t seem to know how to use Google correctly when searching for answers to their problems. The benefit of StackOverflow.com will hopefully be that “newbies” asking “newbie style” questions will hit the right keywords in Google that send them to SO that then sends them to the right MSDN article or blog post or whatever that the “experts” found previously with Google. Kinda circular but it works.
October 22, 2008 at 8:12 am
I agree that it works and it works well. I just see it as the classic give a man a fish or teach him how to fish situation.