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In my experience the search box in Close as duplicate dialog is almost useless.

For example we have a canonical malware removal question. Its score is 454 as I'm writing this. It has over a dozen highly-scored answers, including an accepted one.

Yet when I want to close a malware removal question as a duplicate of this one, I can't find it easily - I usually paste its URL into the search box.

  • Searching for "malware" returns a bunch of questions for me, with the most upvoted one among them being closed with a score of 14. The list also includes a few questions with negative score.
  • "how to remove malware": Yields three highly-upvoted questions (>40), but not the one I'm looking for.
  • "how can i remove malware": Finally, the canonical question is the first result. But the search isn't very useful if I have to remember the title word for word.

Am I misusing the search box somehow? If yes, maybe it should be made more user-friendly?

What could we do to improve the situation?

  • order results by decreasing score?
  • boost questions with accepted answers?
  • consider how many times a question was bookmarked?
  • something else?
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    I have most of the common dupes stashed in a notebook
    – DavidPostill Mod
    Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 14:26
  • I am 98% sure that the list of duplicates is based on the tags used. If I were to hazard a guess, the canonical in question, is likely displayed in the list of relevant questions. It's the second result, I am confused, have you perhaps tried to sort the results differently?
    – Ramhound
    Commented Nov 2, 2020 at 18:01
  • @Ramhound I'm talking about the Close -> Duplicate dialog, there are no sorting options there.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Nov 2, 2020 at 19:11

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