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The downside to this is some closed questions do have great answers on them from before they closed it.

I always wonder why I get more duplicates as my top hit than the question SO left open as the "original" because it at least feels like those are what I hit far, far more.

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There are hundreds of duplicates for some questions: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9686/what-is-the-mo...

...often, with slightly different terms used. So there's a very good chance a given search will find one of the duplicates rather than the original. This is an explicit goal: it helps searches; in fact, if you're not logged in and you land on an unanswered duplicate, Stack Overflow will redirect to the original.

Well, duplicates are probably more likely to get created when the original question is not easy to find using some particular combination of keywords. So in that sense the duplicate is doing it's job.

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