This is annoying. I spend $15$ minutes looking for resources online for a question I have, I check SE, approach$0$, all the wikis, etc. and have found nothing. So, I spend a good while writing up my question on SE. Then, a few minutes after I post it, a user posts a direct link to a duplicate of my question that wasn't even listed in similar questions while I wrote mine.
To make matters worse, I find questions like this and this, obvious duplicates of each other, that have been allowed for 7 years...
Not only is this really frustrating in and of itself, but then these closed and dup questions go down as my error and prevent me from having a positive question record.
So my question is: why do dups appear all over the sight and aren't flagged, but my dup questions are found in an instant?