I know what you mean about searching for local vendors or buying something; my experience is that a Google search isn't great for either of those. I still find Google pretty useful for coding help, though, and personally I don't tend to go straight to somewhere like Stack Overflow.
Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more quickly than a Google search?
Here's my example: In gdb, I want to list all of the threads in my running program. A Google search for "gdb list threads" gives me the answer in the first result. The same search on Stack Overflow doesn't seem to give me the answer in the first few results. This is hardly scientific, of course, so I'm interested to hear of coding questions where Stack Overflow does a better job than a Google search.
Mea culpa. SO was definitely my weak example there... if they had a better on-site search it wouldn't be an issue but I guess they mostly just optimize for Google search. So a lot of the time I end up Googling tech issues, but then clicking on the SO link because I know there will be multiple answers on that page instead of just one.
No worries, I also notice that SO comes up in Google results quite a lot and that's generally how I access it as well so I also do a Google search for tech issues and then end up clicking on the SO link.
Your post yesterday got me thinking about why Google is still pretty useful for coding questions but not so for searches of a more commercial nature. I guess it isn't worth so much money to game Google for the former (Experts Exchange notwithstanding).
Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more quickly than a Google search?
Here's my example: In gdb, I want to list all of the threads in my running program. A Google search for "gdb list threads" gives me the answer in the first result. The same search on Stack Overflow doesn't seem to give me the answer in the first few results. This is hardly scientific, of course, so I'm interested to hear of coding questions where Stack Overflow does a better job than a Google search.