>Though Google takes up a worryingly large fraction of it. Wonder if there could be a shell tool to just dump the first stackoverflow hit for a search.

I saw this yesterday and your comment reminded me of it: https://github.com/danrobinson/tracestack

I kind of thought it was a novel idea, but kind of pointless - if you know how to read a traceback you can Google it... but I guess it makes a lot of sense depending on your workflow.