- off course Google is first; it is cheapest. Back in the day, its equivalent would be a visit to the library. That would come after ask a colleague, visiting one's bookshelf and thinking.
- for some classes of problems, such as algorithm selection, 'Google' requires quite some thinking about what your problem actually is.
- for others, such as figuring out the cause of weird error messages, Google may be about the only option, even though it isn't particularly good (e.g. because your query gives a zillion 'me too' posts plus a couple of five year old 'I did x, and it went away', where there is no reason to expect x to have any effect on the problem, where x seems to be pure overkill (reinstall, reformat), or where the poster readily admits 'it went away for a while'.
- typically, this isn't an either/or proposition. Googling, in particular, does not (have to) rule out thinking.
- off course Google is first; it is cheapest. Back in the day, its equivalent would be a visit to the library. That would come after ask a colleague, visiting one's bookshelf and thinking.
- for some classes of problems, such as algorithm selection, 'Google' requires quite some thinking about what your problem actually is.
- for others, such as figuring out the cause of weird error messages, Google may be about the only option, even though it isn't particularly good (e.g. because your query gives a zillion 'me too' posts plus a couple of five year old 'I did x, and it went away', where there is no reason to expect x to have any effect on the problem, where x seems to be pure overkill (reinstall, reformat), or where the poster readily admits 'it went away for a while'.
- typically, this isn't an either/or proposition. Googling, in particular, does not (have to) rule out thinking.