"More linked questions" view does not show all linked questions

Question

I have a favourite canonical question for PDO problems, "How to squeeze error message out of PDO?"

It's been used many dozens of times, as the "linked" column on that question shows. In fact, there are so many entries that a "see more linked questions..." link appears.

However, the "see more linked questions" page shows only three links, because the url: search pattern is ignoring links in comments.

This doesn't make sense. Can this be fixed?

Also, I notice the links in the comments are all in the

https://stackoverflow.com/q/3726505/

format, while the URL search filter on the "see more..." page, by default, looks for

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3726505/*

if comments were included here, they would be ignored anyway. Shouldn't the pattern rather be

https://stackoverflow.com/q*/3726505/* 

?

Answer 1

Our approach to this will be to show a more true list of the linked questions when you click the "more linked questions" link, rather than relying on the search engine. Limitations of search preclude it from being as accurate as we want in this case. Also, it's worth pointing out for anyone interested that "Linked" here means questions for which there are links on this question page (embedded in the question, answers, or comments) or for which there are links on its page pointing to this one.

For example, Question A has an embedded link to Question B (A -> B). When viewing Question A's page, you'll see Question B in the "Linked" list in the sidebar. However, you'll also see Question A in the sidebar while viewing Question B, even though Question B may not have any embedded links to Question A.

Answer 2

I agree, and it's pretty annoying!

This should be implemented because most of the time, the related questions are found in the comments and not in the answers (links are not proper answers). And as you don't always have the knowledge/time to answer properly, you just leave a comment with the link in order to help the poster of the question.

The meta is a good example of place where related question are linked within comments.

For example see this post that already has 2 "related comments". We can even go further with the Data StackExchange to find posts with the keyword related at the beginning of the comments. You can see this is something pretty common, so the "more linked question" should definitely show links from comments too! We get close to 300 results and that includes only the comments with that exact wording. By including other common wording the results go up really fast.

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Maybe we could have an auto-comment a bit like the "possible duplicate" one, but with a way to "link" a post as related to another, and these would show on the page. That would look like "related to: [link]".

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Also, it would be nice if at the same time the "see more linked question" brought us to a page with the is:question filter. I mean, I don't necessarily want to see all the 27 answers of a question in the list (and miss other related questions that could help me because they appear in page 2037). If I want to see all the answers on a question, I'll go on the link provided by the question.

Answer 3

I agree with this request.

But even if it's implemented, there's still the issue that questions newly marked as duplicates of other questions won't appear in the list of linked questions (even if closed:1 is given in the search query). That's because the search engine ignores the new duplicate blocks containing "This question already has an answer here" when indexing results. I've made a request for that on another question. Maybe that can be merged into this request.