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On meta, I searched for a way to show the notification messages again how can I view the SO notifications again

There were no helpful answers, so I went to the Ask question button.

After putting my search sting into the title of my "new" question, my very question (and answer) showed up in the suggestions. So, the word again was the showstopper.

Now I searched for searching and read How do I search?, where I found tips for refining my questions, and How do I find topics I'm interested in?, where I found nothing helpful, in the Help Center.

After this experience, I guess that the search function uses each word to restrict the results whereas the suggestions have a more sophisticated algorithm to show "similar" questions. But I wanted to be sure about this. If the help page on searching contained also "unrefine" hints, I'd not have asked this question.

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  • Tangentially related
    – Andrew Barber
    Oct 31, 2013 at 12:11
  • @AndrewBarber: Yes. But wouldn't it be good to read this directly in the searching help? How do I suggest changes to help pages?
    – Wolf
    Oct 31, 2013 at 12:20
  • You could actually reword this to suggest such a change. That said, though, I'm not sure that there would be any succinct way to put this information in the Help Center without confusing people. Also, it might too much encourage people to simply start posting a question first, before doing a normal search (on the principle that they would get 'better results' that way).
    – Andrew Barber
    Oct 31, 2013 at 13:45
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    @AndrewBarber: Sorry, maybe I expressed this misleading. I meant to add something like this to the search help: if you are getting surprisingly few results, try to delete a lesser important word from your search
    – Wolf
    Oct 31, 2013 at 14:19

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