I have said "try a search" in the past (terrible admission). What I try to do now is supply a search term that will work for the asker of the question. A good example was a guy asking about "pre-oilers" recently - suggested he tried a search on "Accusump" which turned up a lot of material for him.
You can refer a newbie to a search without appearing stand-offish, just takes a little thought.
As for folks for whom the search engine appears not to work, take a close look at the search definitions - e.g. subject in title only or body text and title, dates to delimit the search, forums in which to search, etc. It has usually worked for me, but there again I was used to some of the older web search engines, where you had to think about your search term a touch. I never knew there were so many people interested in cats.
