Or in a broader context someone does know about. Or maybe someone's just better at getting things out of google.

For example, I once helped a co-worker who was having trouble with a toy webserver written in Go as a learning exercise. It wasn't recognizing url paths that it should have. I don't know Go, but did recognize the problem from our apache/wsgi django setup - path prefixes being stripped. Knowing the right keywords to search for, I was able to find the fix for a config file and we got it working.