Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided

Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it. I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it. Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered. I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering. What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.) People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer. Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.