Google and StackOverflow are kinda the same step. I don't think I've ever gone to search specifically on StackOverflow, but google finds the answer there quite often.

I think this is a natural extension of the work programmers do these days. We don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out a better compression algorithm, but we sure spend a lot of time trying to figure out why some third party tool is throwing an error after upgrading some other third party tool.