For example, just now I was blanking on the name of the poet who wrote "Because I could not stop for death" and Googled it; scanned the results page and found "Emily Dickinson;" done. - Catherine Pellegrino

All the time, these days... hence my belief that any "reference" question (such as: "Who wrote the poem with 'Because I could not stop for death' in it?" no longer needs a librarian (anyone can be trained to key in the question to Google/Bing/whatever). I also acknowledge that this question could be the opening salvo into a really good "research" question - which would need a librarian or at least a reference interview to tease out the real question... but sometimes a simple question is just a simple question, you know? - awd (canoeist in th wild)

Heh. Before I became a librarian, I had a few run-ins with librarians who were hell-bent on turning my simple questions into full-blown reference interviews. "No, really, I just want to know WHO WROTE THE STUPID POEM, OKAY?" - Catherine Pellegrino

Yeah, that's how I had to get to Walt Kelly's name earlier--could only remember Pogo. - Kirsten

You just reminded me of a reference question I had yesterday that might be worth a short blog post later. - Steele Lawman

All the time--although in the examples above, it's probably helpful if you already know the name of the author and just can't remember it. - laura x

This is something that Google "checks for" sometimes, with their "quality raters" (I was a quality rater). - Meg V. Meg

I did end up writing a post that is kind of about this: http://stevelawson.name/seealso... - Steele Lawman

Oh wow. Love that post, Steve! - Catherine Pellegrino from iPod

I have some colleagues that would want to show you how to use a quotations index or a poetry database, because you might need to use those for future similar questions, and we NEED TO TEACH STUDENTS SUCH THINGS. - OMG 404 Joe

Just like Steve's blog post, depends on how good Google is or isn't. - OMG 404 Joe

Anecdote: once I searched for something to the effect of "Why do I have a weird aftertaste in my mouth after I eat anything?" And yes...I found the answer in the search results. (Answer: because I had eaten bad pine nuts.) - Laura H.

Oh! Laura just reminded me that I once searched for "kitchen sink drain gurgles when washing machine empties" and it wasn't even the results page that helped, it was the fact that THAT SEARCH CAME UP IN AUTO-COMPLETE that (helped) to answer my question -- i.e., "okay, this is a known thing, I am not crazy." Hee. - Catherine Pellegrino

Bonus points for anyone whose question was answered just by thinking about Google. - Steele Lawman