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Ive experienced the same thing, but have attributed it to gaining more experience. I feel like the questions answered on stack overflow usually are ones that one can trivially solve by knowing where to find documentation, and the questions I end up wanting help with are too specific to bring up sensible search results. Maybe I'm just bad at using search engines though...

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I think experience (learning where to search) is a part of it.

But a lot of the software I was working with 10 years ago was not open-source - these days I can look up the source all the way to OS level when doing Android stuff for eg.

And documentation is really just much much better - MSDN of old was considered gold standard but nowdays it would be considered bad documentation - like someone else said above docs moved from pure references to more use case focused which makes it much more searchable and eats in SO space.

> attributed it to gaining more experience

This was my thought. When I google stuff and will still see stack overflow as a top result but click on the official documentation instead, which is usually the 3rd or 4th result. SO is still showing up, I just visit it less because I get more value from docs these days.

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