[gitgud]

Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself)

Information shouldn't be removed it's just ranked badly in SEO as it's not as useful.

Stack overflow is quite a fine tuned system, I'm not sure there's much you could do to make it better, without sacrificing something else on the platform.

[dragontamer]

> Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself)

Under the "2-year cycles" model, you'd simply recreate the question, and then self-answer it. There's no reason why you should be searching the archives to know if a question was useful some point in time in the past: if you think its useful, then self-ask and self-answer.

If someone thought that a question from 2011 was useful (but is up for deletion), then they can simply re-ask the question in 2013, 2015, or whatever future date. By "refreshing" a question, you will get better community opinion for which questions are popular enough to deserve more attention.

The good thing about the 2-year limit is that moderators will no longer delete your question for "duplicate" anymore. So you have better assurance that your efforts won't be wasted.

[gitgud]

Yes, but answering a unanswered 5 year old question still brings benefits to the community, I just don't think it warrents deletion, as it won't be ranked highly unless you specifically search for it.

Another reason to preserve the question is for context. Many of my problems have been solved by discovering that someone else had the same error message, but they had different circumstances which leads to clues and possibly discover the root cause, this then could allows you to answer the ancient question (even if it's no longer relavent to the asker).

There's nothing worse than googling an error and having zero results show up...