Originally Posted by
kebosabi
You get double the amount of info and opinions if you can Google in different languages too and be able to see things from a different perspective as well.
IMO, spoon-fed journalism is dead. If you can utilize Google on it's capabilities and know how to do research, and the additional benefit of being able to Google in a different language, the amount of knowledge you get is enormous.
Besides, who doesn't use Google these days. This thread is a perfect example. There were no thread or list or discussion board that extensively discussed EMV a few years ago. Now this thread ranks high up in Google's Page Rank when one searches the term "EMV cards USA." This thread and the Google Docs spreadsheet link is all over travel, credit card, and miles/points hounding websites like milepoint, Frommers, myficoforums, frugal travel guy, million mile secrets, etc. etc.
That may be true, but there is plenty of false information you can find on Google as well. Those of us who have been around FT for a while have some level of faith in the community, and we also have some background in credit cards so we can separate facts from fiction. However, I highly doubt that any random person who stumbles upon our site through a Google search is going to trust what they find, because after all, it is an open Wiki maintained by anonymous people on forum.
If you are doing research on a topic you know nothing about, do you trust discussion boards? I certainly hope not. You can definitely read them to get a feel for the topic, but you should never rely on any information you find that way without verifying it yourself.