>> You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which 
>> ones are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've 
>> never heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be 
>> good? Where are you going to spend the most effort?
> 
> First I'd spend some time investigating what are considered to be good 
> codecs, which ones are popular and which are seldom used, rather than 
> relying on my own knowledge. If I have some I've never heard of (and if 
> so, why would I have them at all), I'd do a little bit of investigating 
> until I had a basic understanding of them

Now here's the thing. Google is very good at answering "what is X?" and 
to some extent "how do I do Y?". But how on earth do you get an answer 
to something like "what's the most popular Z?" Google can't tell you 
that. Only *people* can tell you that.

>> Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
>> instantly answer any possible question.
> 
> I never said that. I said that you should investigate, verify and 
> confirm for yourself. If you search and can't find an answer, that's one 
> thing, when you state something as a categorical truth and half a minute 
> with google proves that it's completely false, that's quite another.

Well this thread started by my stating that *I* couldn't get a decent 
picture out of DivX - which *is* a categorical truth. I know. I was there.

I have never claimed that DivX isn't good; I just said that it didn't 
work for me.

Also, I can't really do a Google search every single time I utter any 
sentence in case something in that sentence is not factually accurate. 
I'd never say anything! There has to be some sane limits here.

> Searching's a skill that needs practice, it's not obvious first time 
> what keywords are going to produce an answer. Sometimes it takes several 
> searches, refining the terms each time based on what's returned and 
> what's not.
> 
> fyi, I've had very few questions where I couldn't get an answer out from 
> either google or a forum/newsgroup/mailing list on the particular 
> subject. That's for work stuff, for stuff that I'm casually interested 
> in, for game-related stuff and for information for my Masters thesis.

Clearly you are radically better at this stuff than I am.

Just the other day I was trying to figure out the relative speed of 
various CPU arithmetic operations, and I couldn't find anything useful 
with Google (as evidenced by my asking here).

It was only a few weeks back that I wanted to know how to configure an 
Exchange public folder so it can receive email. Various websites tell 
you how to do this, but they all assume you have access to the Exchange 
admin console. Is there a way of doing it without that access? I guess 
I'll never know - cos Google sure can't tell me.

There is an endless list of obscure computer problems I've had that 
Google couldn't solve for me. (Clearly nobody else had ever had the 
exact problem I had.)

So yeah, there's a pretty huge sea of questions that I couldn't get 
Google to answer. It's not an Oracle, it's just a search engine.

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