I have seen many questions getting closed as exact duplicates, but what bothers me is that people tend to rename the questions exactly like each other. I think it would make Google searches more powerful if we had wide variety of differently written topics about the same subject, instead of cloning each of the duplicates to have exactly same title.

For example I have sometimes hard time of figuring out the correct keywords for Google when I start searching, and it is very probably that the super-properly-written titles in these sites are not even nearly what I would try to search for!

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up vote 11 down vote accepted

You should leave the title largely as the OP entered it.

Fix any spelling and grammatical errors and make the title an actual question, but don't change it to resemble the duplicate.

Assuming the OP searched and read the related question list prior to posting their question (yes I know it's a big assumption but it has to be made) then the original title is a different way of expressing the same problem and we need to have that on the site so when future searchers come along we've doubled their chances of finding the solution to their problem.

You can find more information on why duplicate questions are potentially a good thing on the blog:


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