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I had a problem with my profile picture and looked through the search to make sure I didn't post a dupe.

The problem is, the title to the question I should have found is :
Why is there a peeking duck on my profile pic.

Now, how do I find such a question ? Because it is the exact same issue. I searched for :
profile picture ... and it came out like 75th in the results (once I knew the title).

Now I tried to search for
profil pic ... and it still cam out in the near 50th.

How should I handle a case like this ? Should I edit the title of the previous question ?

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  • What is your question? What were you thinking of editing the title to?
    – Servy
    Sep 23, 2013 at 14:20
  • meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197775/… . Mine is not better anyway. But it could have been changed to profil picture glitch or gray bar in profile picture. Sep 23, 2013 at 14:22
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    Asking a duplicate question isn't inherently bad. If it was, such questions would just be removed. Instead they stay on the site and get a link to the original question. That way in the future, the chance of someone finding the correct question increases.
    – Stijn
    Sep 23, 2013 at 14:23
  • @Stijn Logicl. I've never seen duplicates this way before. Thanks. Sep 23, 2013 at 14:24
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    @Stijn It's not terrible, but it's not great either; if one can improve the canonical question to make it more likely to be found when searching that's most certainly preferable.
    – Servy
    Sep 23, 2013 at 14:24

1 Answer 1

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Ultimately, if you post a dup of a hard to find post, no one is going to hold it against you, and frankly it would be better because now there is another title that will eventually lead future searchers to the original.

Editing the title of the original might be useful depending on the circumstances, but on meta sites, some humorous titles do become semi-famous so if you edit the humor out, it might be more difficult to find for some users who know it by the original title. But if it makes the post easier to find for most users, I don't think anyone will complain (much).

But one way I've found to help reduce dups before you post them is to use site specific search with Google. Google's search often returns more and different posts that the equivalent SO/SE search.

For this specific case, by searching for profile picture bug site:meta.stackoverflow.com in Google, the dup target shows up as #4, whereas the same search string comes in at #26 in the SO search. Similarly profile pic site:meta.stackoverflow.com shows up #3 in Google vs #50 in SO search. It is not perfect though since searching for "profile picture" doesn't show up on the first page for Google (it doesn't appear until the 5th page).

Generally, when searching for a dup, I try to search using both SE and Google, then search again by typing my question out and looking for related posts (and if the related posts show some different keywords, I might go back to Google to try those).

The extra steps and Google still won't help in every case, but it is an extra step that can be worth it when looking for duplicates.

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