When I click on my Stack Overflow profile icon (as shown in the image below) the user ID appears in the search box automatically, Doesn't that seem odd? Or is this expected?

Search box with user id

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 27 '17 at 20:31

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  • 3
    They do it so you can search your own posts quickly and easily. If you're on your profile, it's assumed that you're looking through your account. If you decide to search something else, ctrl + a is a pretty quick key combo to make, then you just type what you're wanting. (But yes, it's intentional.) Note that this also works for the profiles of others- If you go to my profile, my id will be auto-populated to make searching my posts easier. – Kendra Jan 27 '17 at 20:35
  • 2
    Check out this answer to the same question on Meta Stack Exchange, from an employee of SO: meta.stackexchange.com/a/106148/266735 – Kendra Jan 27 '17 at 20:41

Definitely by design. Also happens if you look at anyone else's profile. As Kendra mentioned in the comments, this allows you to search for someone's posts without having to type (or copy-paste) their user ID.

Speaking for myself, I often find posts that I've previously read by searching for keywords in the posts of people I thought might've been the author. Given the number of similar questions, this can save a lot of time sifting through near-duplicates for that one answer by VonC.

For searching your own posts, you can also type user:me into the search box, which is nice if you don't remember your own user ID or have a really long one or never learned to type numbers properly and also have enough posts that you need to search them. But of course, this won't work for searching anyone else's posts, so the profile-page shortcut is much appreciated in those situations.

See also: Search field on a users' page

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