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We've had a problem a few times in the past couple of weeks here on Meta where the exact same question gets posted repeatedly. It happened when reputation got recalculated, when the envelope disappeared, and now because the reputation graph has been replaced.

Here's a screen shot of the search results for an exact title that's on the front page of Meta now.

What happened to the Reputation Graph? search results

The question doesn't show up at the top of the results, and this is even after I added the and tags to my question.

The question is there, though. It just isn't ranked high enough to be obvious. It appears that users aren't scrolling down beyond the first five results.

What happened to the Reputation Graph? search results

Would it be possible to increase the weight of title text in searches (maybe just on Meta)? I know that this is fundamentally user error, but it seems like placing exact title matches at the very top of search results could alleviate some of these duplicates.

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    Someone will post a link to a duplicate in 3... 2... 1...
    – Bill the Lizard Mod
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 15:05
  • @tvan: Breaking News! :) Seriously though, I can live with general search sucking because I normally just use Google advanced search anyway. It's just the recommendations when you're actually asking a question that concern me.
    – Bill the Lizard Mod
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 15:18
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    That certainly shouldn't be the case, I'll grab a copy of meta and take a look at this exact case this week.
    – Nick Craver Mod
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 15:54
  • If nobody has noticed this till now, it's simply because hardly anybody actually peruses that list. (I do, I just didn't see this issue when asking my questions...)
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 17:41

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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After the next build, the results will be a bit improved here: enter image description here

The questions were ranking higher because a top 40 tag () was boosting those results, I tweaked this a bit so its influence is significantly less.

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  • Thanks a lot, Nick. That should definitely help with duplicates.
    – Bill the Lizard Mod
    Commented Mar 19, 2011 at 12:33

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