Can you provide a query where that is still the case ? It hasn't happened for a few weeks for me, since stack overflow changed their title seo.
The efreedom answer at the 5th position is actually the most relevant - the stackoverflow question from which it was copied doesn't even show up on the first page. There is one stackoverflow result on the first page, but it deals with a more complex related issue, not the simple question I was looking for.
It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater time investment to read through to find the relevant sections.
I guess that's a tribute to how well stackoverflow works, most the time. And also to how lazy I am.
Of course, then all the content-copy farms will respond by copying valid content plus word lists - hopefully Google knows how to detect that.
Stackoverflow comes in at number 8 while clones are 6 and 10
The reason Q&A sites are so visible is that people tend to type questions in their search engines, so Q&A sites are a good match to those.
And then another SEO cycle would start. Don't forget that before google came along nobody was trying to 'game the system' with backlinks and other trickery, the fact that that google is successful is what caused people to start gaming google.
Typically you pretend the search engine is a black box, you observe what goes in to it (web pages, links between them and queries) and you try to infer its internal operations based on what comes out (results ranked in order of what the engine considers to be important).
Careful analysis will then reveal to a greater or lesser extent which elements matter most to it and then the gaming will commence. Only by drastically changing the algorithm faster than the gamers can reverse-engineer the inner workings would a search engine be able to keep ahead but there are only so many ways in which you can realistically speaking build a search engine with present technology.
Your ideal, I'm afraid, is not going to be built any time soon, if you have any ideas on how to go about this then I'm all ears.