See im different there. If the guy is a real tool I look extra hard where I saw it go in just to bruise his ego.

You beat me to it. I was going to say that if I am going to help them look, I always walk 20 or 30 yards back toward the tee from where they are searching and I normally find it right there.

Yes I do. I will usually go to my ball first and play, then go help him look. That way sometimes he will find it on his own and I've just saved a little time.

I don't really care if I get help from a stranger when I'm looking for my ball... It's nice, but it won't ruin my day if he doesn't help me. I really don't generally spend much time looking anyway, and I've usually played a provisional ball, so a minute or so then I just play the second ball.

I usually walk so if the path their lost ball took is along the same path as mine, I will help them. If not, then I will find mine first, and maybe even take my next shot if they are still looking. Ready golf means just that.

Since I pretty much have my club distances dialed in, I just let my GPS tell me when I am in the general area of where my lost ball might be. Their's too, if they have the correct yardage to work with.

+1...Could not have said it any better.

If I spend half the day looking for other peoples balls I just usually start sucking. It gets my tempo so off that I forget about my shot. So usually I'll play my shot then help them look if its becoming habit forming. If its the occassional bad shot I'll spend as long as they do to help them out. We all hit bad shots so I know when I hit one I would love a little extra help. I really feel bad having people help me look so I'm usually just trying to get them to go ahead and hit a ball so I don't affect their game but most of the guys I play with won't go until you either find it or end up dropping. I guess I have some nice playing partners.

It sounds like most here are on the same page. Help some here and there, but you can't devote yourself to helping someone you don't know. I try to do the same thing, but I play mostly with my wife and daughter and often end up with a single in my cart as there is no walking where we play. Being in the same cart I sometimes feel locked in to helping, but many times will drop them off, hit my ball, then go back for a quick look. As we have been paired with the same people on a number of occasions and have become friends, I spend more time looking for the errant shots of those players.

I don't feel it should be an expected action beyond some minor common courtesy. My buddy and I played last week with a couple of nice guys that could not keep the ball in play. We helped early in the round, but then gradually stopped helping. They were also slow players, lots of practice swings and chatting when they should have been addressing the ball and hitting.

It was a frustrating day.

Kevin

We/I will help look for lost golf balls, but no harder than I look for the ones I hit astray. When riding in a cart, going to help look is usually not too big of an issue. I usually don't look more than a minute or two, so that's all I'll spend on theirs. If it gets to being on a lot of shots, some of the time they just have to do it on their own.

It's nice if they help me look for mine, but I don't care if they do. I suppose that if they never helped me look it might affect how often and how hard I'll help them look for theirs.

The most annoying thing with ball-searches is when I am done searching for my ball, for example one that went waaaay into the woods, and want to drop, or re-hit, or whatever, but I can't get the well-meaning helpers to abandon the "not-a-chance" search!! I have come up with some great lines for that situation, such as "Hey, search for your own ****ing ball!" and "If I had known you guys were like this, I would have hit it in the fairway!", but I haven't used them yet!