I see what you mean, but my experience is quite often that I have to hunt a lot to get answers to straightforward questions. After a fair bit of effort (if I keep going, sometimes for a considerable time...) I'll get the answer - but not always even then. (of course, for very common questions, the answer does often pop up immediately - I'm certainly pleased when that happens.) Asking in a forum is great, and usually effective, provided you know enough about the question and know an appropriate forum (eg. stackoverflow for programming questions). I should have included "commonly asked questions" as well as "reference questions". Search engines are great at harvesting this low hanging fruit which would otherwise go to waste.

But in the other two cases, the answers are not immediate, which was the thrust of the statement to which I objected - it's quoted above, and includes "instant gratification", "answered immediately" and "almost any question". We're not there yet, we've only got the easy stuff. Wolfram|Alpha is an attempt to go a bit deeper, and it's also part of Google's mission.