Is it OK to reply to a question with a comments like "I found answers by googling: www.example.com" or "A google search produces rich results"?
I have seen comments like this on a few questions recently, including most recently:
Could data be recovered from cut magnetic stripe card?
Personally, I don't think this is a trivial question and I think it is relevant to a lot of people. We all have debit/credit/access cards with a magnetic stripe that we will need to dispose of at some time, and in a professional setting we may need to define a policy for disposal of old cards.
I have a few issues with this comment:
- If you search for the question on Google, the first result is now the question on security.stackechange.com, and the second result is a site that reuses stack exchange data. In fact, if I now google the question "could data be recovered from cut magnetic stripe card" I don't see any useful answers from what I would consider to be a reliable site.
- The link provided has one sentence related to reading data from cards that have been cut, and provides no further information other than advanced card readers are available from a company called Card Reader Factory.
- The link is to a wordpress blog, which does not seem to be an authoritative answer in a way that a link to e.g. the official Java docs would be.
- The comment did not provide the search terms used to find the link on Google.
The Stack Exchange FAQ and Meta Stack Exchange site include some relevant questions and answers that deal with this issue: