If you ever ask students a question that could be answered by checking in google (or their textbook), you're asking the wrong kinds of questions. Although it is true that knowledge people can often answer these questions correctly, and ignorant people cannot, merely knowing is almost never useful. Students are often told, "Trust me -- you'll need to know this someday." But students aren't dumb. They've seen this enough to know that it's often not true and, even when it is true, the answer may well have changed by the time they need to know that particular piece of information.
A related problem creeps in with people who look at Bloom's Taxonomy and believes that students need to satisfy the lower levels (knowledge and comprehension) before they can begin to do the higher levels (application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation). This is just plain wrong.
Real problems, like the kind that you want to hire educated people to solve, are always higher-level problems. To address these problems does require knowledge and comprehension and it is precisely for these reasons that we should ask students to solve these problems right from the beginning. This is what provides the rationale to students for why they need to learn basic information.