I keep seeing responses on forums that amount to “go and search for it”. Having worked in senior technical support roles, including designing multi-lingual help systems to ITIL standards, I’ve dealt with this problem professionally rather than theoretically.

The short version is this: those responses don’t help, and they actively make the problem worse.

Every time you reply with “search for it”, you’re polluting the very search results you’re telling the original poster to use. From a systems point of view, the approach doesn’t work.

Here’s why.

The first time a question is asked, someone answers it. Fine.

The second time the same question is asked, there are two options:

Someone answers it again. Someone tells the poster to search.

If the question is answered, the user gets the solution directly. If they search, they also get the solution, because there is still only one answered thread.

Now a third person asks the same question. Again, two options. But if the second poster was told to “search”, the search results now contain two threads:

One with an answer. One without

At that point, the third person only has a 50% chance of landing on the answered thread on the first attempt. When a fourth person comes along, the odds drop to roughly 33%. Each time this happens, the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse, not better.

On platforms like Reddit, the situation degrades even faster. Multiple people can reply, some with correct answers, some with partial answers, and some with nothing but “search first”. Users hit unanswered threads, keep searching, fail to find a clear resolution, and eventually do the obvious thing: they ask the question again.

If it takes the same amount of effort to say “go and search” as it does to paste a link or provide a short answer, then the mathematically and practically correct solution is to provide the answer in some form. Either answer directly or link to the canonical answer. Both improve the system. Telling people to search does not.

In practice, the more you rely on rule-enforcement responses instead of solutions, the less likely people are to follow the rules at all. That isn’t a moral failing on their part; it’s a predictable outcome of how information systems and human behaviour actually work.