Whenever I try to close a question as duplicate, a floating window pops up which is a mini search engine to find duplicate question.

But it is never helpful(except in exceptional cases). For example, when I tried to search for the unmet dependencies question with following terms

unmet dependency
unmet dependencies
how to resolve unmet dependencies

none returned the question I was searching for. Finally, I had to put part of the exact title

how do I resolve unmet dependencies

to get the question I was searching for. This happens everytime I try to close a question.

So I think this thing needs some serious makeover.

BTW this is somewhat related to How do I quickly find the duplicate questions I'm searching for when flagging/closing?

  • 3
    I agree. Adding score:10 helps sometimes, but in general this search thing is almost entirely useless.
    – Seth
    May 3 '15 at 15:36
  • 7
    I always use google with "site=askubuntu.com"...
    – Mateo
    May 3 '15 at 15:46
  • 1
    The search engine is not useful. Period.
    – muru
    May 4 '15 at 3:21
  • @muru See my answer - it may be of interest to you.
    – Tim
    May 4 '15 at 12:27
  • Cross site duplicate: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/187773/…
    – Tim
    May 4 '15 at 20:43
  • @Seth so can/will anything be done about this? May 14 '15 at 13:27

This has been discussed elsewhere already:

Search (and not just dupe search !) is just bad.

You could use Google with site:askubuntu.com, put score:10 in dupefinder box, just bookmark the questions which you use as duplicate most often so you have the link, or something else.


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