Interesting read, and the whole thread was shut down by moderators... as usual!
Organic discussion following a tangent that many readers and contributors found interesting and valuable as evidenced by their posts and upvotes? KILL THAT FILTH BEFORE IT SPREADS!
There's nothing so frustrating as getting an exact hit to your question only to find SE filled with "just google it" responses and "closed because duplicate" moderator actions, complete with a link to a vaguely similar post that usually differs in at least one subtle but critical or aggravatingly inconvenient way. Then you're left to hope that a generous contributor has managed to slip an answer in before the hammer fell, because despite the "assurances" from all the "google it" posters, the other google hits always seem to be composed primarily of completely irrelevant SE posts, out of date forum discussions from 2003, Expert Exchange paywalls, and answers.com galleryspam.
At least with the spam sites I can recognize that they will be useless from the URL alone :/
If the answer has a lot of upvotes, how is it irrelevant in the greater scheme of things?
If the answer has a high search ranking and you're using it to drive traffic to SE, and it's closed, is that even right?
I think they should back their own horse and remove closed content from their Google search index.
If anything this mod policy and closed tickets make it obvious there's a market need that's not being fulfilled.
The issue is, the StackOverflow boards aren't discussion boards. It's a Q&A system. If your question doesn't have one (or a few) unambiguously correct answer(s), it's not a fit for the site.
In many areas of business, it also might be a hint that someone is about to disrupt you. If Stack Exchange is the Myspace of Q&A sites, who will be the Facebook?
Stack Exchange's creator is looking at how to improve forums with Discourse, so that might very well happen.