@b0rk For me, it is avery very old habit. When I started out poking at Unix systems, if I wanted to "get information from outside the computer I was on", I could, if I was lucky, turn my head and ask someone else in the same room.
Otherwise, I would have to fire up a newsreader, post to UseNet, wait for the UUCP spool to empty (over a modem), wait for the reply to be written, then wait for the relevant article to trickle back in a later UUCP update batch.
I will, frequently, after having opened the man page, start a web search pretty soon after, because many man pages are badly written (and I must say that good technical writing is a skill that doesn't necessarily correlate with "ability to write code").