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Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
5:05 AM
-3
Q: A suggestion to improve 'similar questions' suggestions.

An old man in the sea.Sorry for the title. When I write a new question, right below the title, a drop-down menu opens up with suggestions of questions similar to mine. My suggestion is to interact that menu with the tag system, in a way that only questions with at least one of my tags shows up. Now, any question, ...

discussion feature-request
I think tags are already used for that purpose. At least that's my impression from the post on Meta Stack Exchange:
2
A: Would it be feasible to tie the tags of a new question to the Related Questions list?

Jeff AtwoodThis is completed in the sense that the dynamic /ask page does use title, tags, and body Feedback requested: Similar Questions displayed in sidebar on /ask However, I don't support re-ordering the form; I think title, then body, then tags is the best flow.

27
Q: Feedback requested: Similar Questions displayed in sidebar on /ask

Jeff AtwoodIn order to help people find duplicate questions as they ask, we are now showing Similar Questions in the right hand sidebar on the /ask page. This is deployed to all sites right now. Here's how it works: it is specific to the /ask page you must have entered a title (any length) and a minimu...

discussion asking-questions similar-questions
> every 45 seconds while you compose your question, we will query for Similar Questions based on the title, body, and tags you have entered
Although things might have changed since that post.
The screenshot in the post on Meta Stack Exchange is shown like this:
What I get when try to fill in a question looks a bit differently
Maybe something more can be found in the similar-questions tag.
Does somebody know a bit more about this?
Has this feature changed recently?
 
 
2 hours later…
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
7:20 AM
in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 7 mins ago, by rene
@Martin I think that is an A/B test. Let me find a similar question ....
in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 1 min ago, by rene
@Martin found it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/384710/duplicate-questions-display-experiment
125
Q: Duplicate questions display experiment

JWillbornMy name is Jane and I have been working at Stack Overflow for almost six months. I started out as an apprentice last year and now I've graduated to developer. I was the lead dev on this project. One of the most vexing problems with Stack Overflow getting old is that our repeated question proble...

discussion duplicate-questions user-interface a-b-testing
So the A/B testing is probably the reason why the list of similar questions looks differently to me than i used to.
One of the answers in that thread is:
128
A: Duplicate questions display experiment

Travis Jfeature-request Include the chosen tags in the search criteria for "Questions that may already have your answer." Please include the tags (when present) in the list of suggested duplicates. Without the tags, the titles are rarely relevant even when direct matches of what would be viable solut...

 
An old man in the sea.
An old man in the sea.
8:01 AM
Martin, you may be right, I don't know... However, lately I've noticed that sometimes, the first suggestions to questions 'similar' to mine are in completely different fields, just because 1 or 2 words are used in abundance.
For example my last question in math.se about interpretation of the composition of integral operators. Most of the related questions were on general topology, and multivariable calculus, at least the first few questions... Or maybe it's because those tags I used had precisely very few related questions... I don't know.
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
This is what more experienced users told me - you can see the entire conversation in that room:
in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 31 mins ago, by Meta Andrew T.
I believe the Similar Questions on the sidebar (but gone already) indeed did include the tags, but not the Related Questions under the title.
@Anoldmaninthesea. Maybe you could improve the title of your question on meta a bit, to make clear you suggest to include the tags as a criterion.
Maybe the reason why some users downvoted your post was that they consider it unclear.
It seems that the posts I linked in my comment are already outdated - so my claim that the tags are used there is incorrect. (Still, I suppose they are used for related question - which are shown in the sidebar after the question is posted.)
The fact that it is not clear whether the A-B testing is already over makes the situation even more muddled.
At the very least, one think we could do is upvote the feature request on on Meta Stack Overflow that I linked above.
 
An old man in the sea.
An old man in the sea.
9:13 AM
I''ve just upvoted, Martin. Thanks ;)
 

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