I hear this same complaint on web development forums a lot, and usually my response to people saying this runs along the lines of "stop being such a jerk"
Sadly forums oft become insular that way, with effete elitists looking down their noses at nubes, the poor, or anyone else who isn't privileged enough to light money on fire, or experienced enough to even know what to search for.
That last part being an important one. "Normal people" don't know the difference between a seatpost, seat tube, or seat stay. Look at the amount of crazy made up terms people use to describe different parts of a bike frame. Even if you are mechanically inclined with engineering experience, a lot of terms -- bottom bracket for example -- are complete gibberish. Such as when there's
nothing remotely resembling what the word bracket even means. To compare to web development, it's like how normal people don't know that Java is to JavaScript as Ham is to Hamburger.
And then you have the morons who don't even know that hamburger is beef.
A rookie may simply not even know enough of the terminology to form a relevant search term!
Then of course there's the fact they may have -- like I did -- landed on this forum in a search even though the question wasn't answered here already. You find a forum full of people knowledgeable on topics, how DARE the nube ask a question? To blazes with that and foxtrot right off with that entire attitude!
Similarly -- as a web developer I know this one far too well -- on a lot of topics you'll find search filled with sellers listing products that may or may not be relevant, a match, etc. Again take a bottom bracket where we have a half dozen different diameters and hundreds of width combinations between the shell and the shaft. Compounded by the fact that many companies don't even list what BB cart they're using so if you've not taken it out, you're in the dark.
Given the plethora of non-standardization, lack of information from sellers and builders, piss-poor support from bikes normal people can afford, it's hardly a shock normal people who don't have bike shops in their garages or an LBS they can trust come here asking questions. Questions YOU might know what to google for, but they most certainly do not!
Thus why "just go to your LBS" is as arrogant and assumptive as "Just spend two thousand more" or "Google it stupid!". As if they even have access to such a thing, or haven't already tried that. FFS Googling it might be what brought them here!
A situation only exacerbated by another aspect of web development, the sleazy dirtbag rubbish that is "black hat search engine optimization" -- SEO.
There is legitimate SEO, it usually involves writing pages in an accessible manner so that non-visual user-agents (a browser is a UA but a UA isn't always a browser) can figure out what the content is. There's a whole host of things like logical document structure, semantic markup, and dozens of other things most of you likely don't know that's involved.
The problem is there are a lot of predatory scam artist bunko peddlers who know how to temporarily 'game the system" to make it look like their BS works in the short term, so they can pull a Billy Joe and Bobby Sue, and take the money and run before it blows up in the site owners face. Through tricks and manipulation they get their pages to page 1 of google, when the content is utterly irrelevant to what any user wants. Thus "google it stupid" doesn't work when disreputable snake oil doctors abuse the algorithms to put their turds devoid of content front-and-center. The proverbial can of shellac on a pile.
An example of this is a guy I knew a decade ago who claimed to be an SEO god. He held up as the pinnacle of his work how a site he built for a Photoshop plugin was #1 in search for a specific term.
In marketing there's this concept called "non-competing competitors", where a company gets so obsessed with competing, they end up wasting time and money going up against companies that aren't even their competitors. It's one of the major logic fallacies that scammers pretending to be marketers use to hold onto their jobs. How is that relevant?
Every other listing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for this guys search phrase were for automotive powder coating, not photoshop plugins. That's the "keywords research scam" where they cherry pick a term nobody is competing for in the space, that people are entering into search, to drive traffic to the site. What makes it a scam is that said traffic isn't looking for your product, so whist yes you're getting buns in seats, you're not getting coins in your coffers from them. In business that's called "conversions", converting someone who came in the door into a sale. If you're spending time and money on marketing trickery that doesn't result in conversions, you're just lighting money on fire.
Thus search while an amazing tool if you know what you're looking for and how to word it properly, between marketing scams, advertising scams, site development scams, and the ignorance of people new to a topic, it is not the be-all end-all that magically works for everyone.
And to assume it is --
particularly for people not as knowledgeable as yourself on a topic -- amounts to nothing more than being a pompous, egotistical, pretentious, snooty, uppity, conceited snob
who needs to get the foxtrot hotel off their high horse!
Probably the most ignored poster on EBR.
