Should Yahoo find a way to ban all the questions whose answers can be easily found surfing the Internet?

Question

This will eliminate a lot of questions of this type: "Who was JFK?"

Answer 1

yes. I agree. I mean half of the questions can be resolved simply by doing a little research of their own.

Answer 2

(Imagining a bunch of programmers, tearing their hair out, figuring "how do we write the SOFTWARE for this sort of filtering device, anyway???? Man, talk about an end user....!"
It's frustrating seeing really "obvious" queries posted here, when a relatively simple Google-type search will get you plenty of hits. (And they're not that difficult to limit, even if you have only a vague idea of what JFK might stand for.) A goodly portion is laziness, pure and simple.
It seems weird, that the _quality_ of general writing and functional literacy seems to be deteriorating---and there's so MUCH more available to us, and so easily, nowadays!
When I was a girl (shortly after we learned to control the technological marvel now known as "fire"), I would have killed for the Internet; we had old-fashioned books! Teachers tortured us; they made us write *term papers* several times a year and actually _gave us Fs_ for major grammar/spelling errors.
But kids routinely left grammar school with the reasonably decent functional literacy skills, and the sure knowledge that you could enlist the help of others for just a little while.
Don't mind the naive questions here; I've asked my share, goodness knows. The lazy ones?---OK, everyone can have a bad brain day. The offensive/racist/tacky ones--sheesh, somebody needs to go up on the meds or go back to the playground.
But the horribly spelled ones, or the ones in IMspeak----pass me the aspirin, and maybe a good stiff drink.....

Answer 3

Absolutely not!! The Internet is a great resource. This is just an open "Answers" web site. You will get stupid and highly intelligent people here. There is no way to guage exactly what each person should know, because each is a totally different person. We will all see questions such as "Who was JFK?" Fine. Enlighten the asker, or go to the next question. It's that simple.

Answer 4

They could but why? Frankly, as time moves on, not everyone is going to know who JFK was. You can't ever say when a simple question is a bad question. Perhaps there is so much information out there that the person is having time narrowing it down. Perhaps they are lazy. Perhaps their question is a study of social reactions and not about JFK at all.

Then again, maybe they are just playing the points game.

I say just leave it alone and ignore questions that bug you.

Answer 5

I think 'JFK' questions are all right.
I was 8 years when he was shot and don't remember all.

Besides, some of us are (still) rather unfamiliar with Net, Web and whatever - this is my chance to get into things in a peaceful way.

And I don't ask just to make time go - when I ask I want to know!

I only wish the folks out there would check their spelling so foreigners like me didn't think too bad about the educational system in your country. I'm used to reading and writing English, but 'u' for you, 'ur' for either 'you are' or 'your' appears to be a little heavy whwn you at the same time must correct your (foreign) eyes to misspellings and keyboard misses.

Such things make me develop a pain in my hair.

Answer 6

I dont think yahoo should ban anything, becuase alot of people view other people's questions as stupid when they are being serious or can't find the information. I agree, people do ask questions that can easily be googled, but maybe they just dont want to do the searching or think that the other people may have better insight.

Answer 7

I don't mind the simplistic questions. The ones they really need to clean off are the juveniles trying to find a date and the ones trying out their XXX rated vocabulary.
I figure a question like you mention (JFK), really needs some help. It might be because they don't spell properly or searched awkwardly.

Answer 8

There are a lot of things I think Yahoo should ban on this site. I don't see it happening though, they don't even regulate what's on here now. I see racist, insulting, non-comprehensible, cursing questions and answers that I know get reported but are never taken off.

Answer 9

No, only because some of the questions are genuinely asked by those who simply don't know where to look, or how to use a search engine effectively. But I do see what you mean about people who are just too lazy to look for themselves. Worse yet are the students who want you to do their homework for them; that's just bad form!

Answer 10

No, because half the questions asked are ones like that. IF they were banned the site would slow way down.