Part of it stems from the UI of Google groups basically.  Many
questions have been answered thousands of times but those just float
to the bottom never to be seen again.  You could try saving them in
your favorits by starring them, only to have that list magically
purged occaisionally.

The Googlers did a good job of putting together a FAQ list some time
ago, but editing and adding to that has been abandoned.  I still say
that the easiest way to stifle the frequently annoying questions is to
make someone have to read the FAQ before being able to join the group,
however that has not been instituted at all.  I mean it's pretty darn
hard to miss the FAQ when you first enter the group (http://www.jlh-
design.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/google-webmaster-help-google-
groups.png) but yet people do.

We started are own manned FAQ site a while back but that lost steam.
I'd love to see a sticky here that had links to very important threads
and answers mainly by Googlers, but that has also not been instituted.

I stored all the FAQ in a Google Notebook shared application so people
could quickly cut-n-paste the FAQ with links, but that also did not
gain any momentum.

So the long and the short of it is this, all of these concerns have
been brought up before, lots of suggestions have been made, some
instituted, others not, and yet the same frustration exists.  But
believe me when I say things are much better now than they were
before.  JohnMu and others participate a lot more than before,
tackling the tough and easy questions better than ever.  They've
acknowledged a lot of peoples hard word in more ways than one.  We
don't know how many people are actually reading the FAQ and not asking
the same question 30 times a day (though I wish they'd add something
about sitelinks!!!!!) We've got an escalate feature if some of the
more experienced posters think a particular thread needs Googler
attention now that didn't exist before.

My number 1 concern is that information here be accurate and I think
steps have also been made to make that true.

After a while I think you'll find that you will learn to ignore 99% of
the people coming in here wondering why using link: in google doesn't
show the link from the blog that they bought a link on yesterday or
how can they get those nice links under their domain name like
microsfoft has.  If everyone ignored them, they'd eventually search
for the answer.  Another thing that you'll pick up is how to judge if
the person is going to actually come back and read the response,
because nothing is more frustrating than writing a long thought out
answer only to never see a response.  Clues to this are short
questions (no time invested in it) or people that try to leave an
email address.   People to avoid are also ones that don't know enough
to actually form a reasonable question like, "How can I make my site
rank better?" No specifics, no keywords, no metrics, just BETTER.

Oh well, I'd say you can also take solace in the fact that if you are
getting frustrated that means that you are personally invested and
that it matters to you.  To which I say, WELCOME, to the group of
regulars, and I'm glad you are amongst us.

On May 16, 10:19 am, Autocrat wrote: