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The questions shown when asking a question are only based on the title, but it seems that the "related" sidebar, only shown after submission, often catches much more relevant questions. This isn't surprising because the latter has the full text of the question plus tags to work with. (Though I don't know exactly how it works.)

Proposed feature: Generate a list of related questions using more information than just the title and display them on the same page as initially editing the question.


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Case in point: I didn't find the duplicate meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27566/… until I looked at the "related" list after submission, possibly because the [related-questions] tag didn't occur to me until just before submission. –  Gnome Mar 19 '10 at 16:31

3 Answers 3

I'd be pissed off if I was told there's a question similar to what I asked after I spent the time to write it all out in detail. Please keep the early duplication prevention step and rather refine the results as more data is written (if possible).

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This is why my feature request shows these results on the same page as when initially editing the question. If you want it displayed at the top instead of the bottom, that's a minor quirk: just include more information, especially tags, so it's as accurate as the "related" sidebar, and I'll be happy. –  Gnome Oct 4 '10 at 9:19
yeah, this is the conundrum. See my 1st comment here: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/asking-better-questions –  Jeff Atwood Oct 4 '10 at 9:58
@Jeff: They're even less likely to "throw it away" after clicking submit than before. As it stands, you can only see the related sidebar after submit, and (due to not generating it immediately) only several minutes after that. Perhaps a rearrangement such as (top-down) title-tags-list-body, where the list is generated from title and tags, is even better; there's very little invested from just entering title and tags, but it could help that list tremendously. –  Gnome Oct 23 '10 at 7:17

Even more obvious: I would suggest that the question submittance is a two-step process. That is, the button should say “Proceed to posting the question” instead of “Post your question”, and then showing the list of relevant questions (now related using the full text) right above the (now visible) “Post your question”.

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This may or may not be a good idea, but even if it was implemented, I wouldn't want to abandon a dynamically updating list shown while editing the question. That is, make it more like Google's new Instant feature rather than having a long deliberation while formulating the question—only to hit a button and see a long list of duplicates that give you an answer. –  Gnome Oct 4 '10 at 9:03
Sure, keep the dynamically updating list; it's a potential time saver. Hwever, the intermediate list helps (not unlike the fresh “rules for questions” page when the submitter has a very low reputation) avoid duplicate questions. –  tzot Oct 4 '10 at 11:41

I was posting a new question on Meta, and the following came up on the right side of the screen:

enter image description here

Maybe it is about to be launched?

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@JeffAtwood I see. that's great. –  Oscar Mederos May 17 '11 at 1:26

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