Currently have a junior dev on the team that asks way too many questions, most that can be easily googled. How do we push him in the right direction to become more independant.
While it may often seem simple to "just Google it," it can be difficult for people to come up with appropriate queries and weigh results, especially in new/unknown contexts.
A lot of the time we have ready answers if other people ask us questions because we're actively ready to attack and criticize to get an answer, but we're more reluctant to do that with ourselves. So if the teaching approach doesn't work, then another way is to ask him to list up the questions he has, give it 10-15 minutes, then review them himself to see how he would answer them -- the idea is to give him some time to "reset" and get a fresh perspective.
When it was my chance to mentor, I would sit with the junior guy and just talk about the context and problem at hand. Talk about the keywords and then form a query to google. I would sometimes intentionally put in the wrong query and then refine it for better results. It worked.
But juniors are sometimes bad at retaining processes and a similar query would pop up in a few weeks again. Then I would just send them a lmgtfy link (which is a dick move. Don't do this). Have some compassion, patience and empathy. It might take longer but that guy will thank you in the long run.