I think that this is actually really encouraging in showing that we still have a ways to go in improving search engines. A lot of people treat search engines as a solved problem, at least for non-question answering aspects.
Google has gotten significantly _less_ useful for finding technical information over the last decade or so. It used to be the case that when searching for some tech-related item (say, how to use functions in bash), the results would take you to someone's personal website or a wiki. Ostensibly, the more people linked to it and the more people clicked on it in the results, the better it ranked for that query and similar queries.
Today, entering in any tech-related query at all takes you to StackOverflow, end of story. Not only are SO answers quite often outdated (or even terrible advice in general), most of the time I'm not looking for a "here's how you do X", I'm looking for background information on a topic.
Most non-tech queries I put into google are even _more_ useless as the results tend to fall into these categories:
* Wikipedia (okay for _very_ general things, useless for domain-specific knowledge)
* SEO-enhanced blogspam, (a.k.a. "8 Weird Ways to Earn Millions Through Gaming The System!")
* Tweets on twitter (!)
The dev/tech industry desperately needs a search engine that somehow prioritizes _quality_ content, not one-off answers, blogspam, and tweets.
I am amazed at the amount of things people are willing to treat as "solved problem".
At a point there was a TED talk explaining social networks were a solved problem now that facebook was dominant. Recycling was seen as solved problem until it wasn't etc.
I wonder how many actual "sovled problems" we have.
