We discussed your question in the initial post up above at the top of the page. It's similar to the analogy of throwing everything in the trash versus recycling it.

Nowadays, there's not much incentive for you to recycle your cans beyond kinda just wanting there to be a better tomorrow. Some people don't care at all about doing the right thing and just toss everything into the trash and always will. Others don't mind doing their part (especially if it's a small part).

It's also the argument some people make about Open Source. Why would I release my not-currently-useful source code to others when I can hold onto it for some endeavor in the future?

bug.gd is a lot like that sort of dilemma-- why are you doing all of that error research and losing it to be reperformed by the next fellow? Why does the guy behind you also have to come along, dig through unhelpful forum posts of "solved it myself, thanks", experts exchange hidden pages, etc, etc? If you take the split second to record a sentence or a link that solved your issue, people don't have to repeat your work.

The long-term goal is that you'd find the solution quicker on bug.gd than anywhere else because we specialize solely in error messages and the solutions come with ratings from other visitors in the results.

Also, bug.gd allows you to search against the entire error message, multi-lines and all (with no 32 word restriction like Google). You won't be able to do that on Google, though we've all lived with having to sit there and manually reconstruct our error message in a form Google likes. (Why do that, though?)

In the end, the people who aren't interested in improving things for everyone with a tad more work will stick with Google and be happy. More than a few of them will be taking advantage of people who do want to do their part and use bug.gd.

We're very much in favor of reducing the barriers that make this model less comfortable (e.g. design and email request, see the Firefox extension above that doesn't require that).

For example, we have a feature nearly ready to go live that allows you to simultaneously search in Google and/or an appropriate KB site. The complicated part is helping the user quickly rebuild the error in a form that those search engines will handle properly, but we abolutely want to help them get the solution to their problem however it may be.

In the end it helps everyone when someone uses bug.gd to solve a problem.

Thanks again for the feedback, and I hope I answered your question to some degree.