Yes, it leads to better results than using the Stack Overflow search.
If SO was smart they would write an advanced search form that basically just translates into google compatible syntax and forwards it to google (assuming there are no legal issues with this.) Are there legal issues with this, is this a violation of the google TOS??
My gut feeling is that Google would probably be pretty ok if you just generate some (very specific) links to their search.
If you scrapped their results and embedded them into your page, that might be a different story. (They wouldn't like it.)
Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things. My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations: I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I…
I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success. This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote that. This leads to there being a significant reward for gettin…
In this and other contexts, I've wondered about the viability of stepped intervals. Accumulate responses, and later further responses and votes, behind the scenes, but only update the published thread every 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or some to-be-determined optimal interval (that might change over time / post age, size, etc.).