Feedback requested: Similar Questions displayed in sidebar on /ask

Question

In order to help people find duplicate questions as they ask, we are now showing Similar Questions in the right hand sidebar on the /ask page.

This is deployed to all sites right now. Here's how it works:

• it is specific to the /ask page
• you must have entered a title (any length) and a minimum body length of 220 characters.
• every 45 seconds while you compose your question, we will query for Similar Questions based on the title, body, and tags you have entered
• if we found a different set of similar questions since the last time we checked, the sidebar on the right will update with a fade animation and the Similar Questions, replacing the How to Format help.

You can mouse over the similar question links to get a tooltip preview of the question bodies.

(Yes, we do already show Related Questions after you leave the title field, but that is based purely on a title-based match and does not look at body or tags at all.)

This is currently experimental, but the goal is to help question askers find potential duplicates and related questions without bugging them with interstitial pages. Test it out, preferably when asking real questions (as I am now!)

If you have feedback on this, let us know.

Answer 1

This is a great idea, I was thinking about this just today when I saw Add "from the Related sidebar" to the auto-generated "Possible duplicate" comment, since it seems like the problem there is that those questions weren't showing up before the "Post your Question" button was hit. (and, given how many different feature-requests there were for it.)

However, the only feedback I have, is that there will probably be a bit of user confusion over "Related Questions" and "Similar Questions" both showing up at the same time: "They sound like the same thing — but show different results. I'm confused. And sad."

(Proposal - title change and maybe some Javascript attention on when related questions shows/hides)

Answer 2

Fantastic idea! My feedback:

On my screen the bottom edge of the box is clipped which looks a bit broken (this box scrolls with the window)

My screen resolution is 1366x768 (laptop) and I'm using Firefox 4.0.1

Also I think it would be useful to reduce or eliminate the character limit - many simple questions can be expressed perfectly adequately in less than 220 characters and now that I know this is here I'll probably start entering my tags before the question body to see if I get any matches.

For example my test question was:

I can't find any iron!

I want to build myself a large mine cart system in Minecraft but I can't find enough iron!

What can I do to try and find more iron?

[Minecraft] [iron]

Once I copied and pasted the content of the above question a couple of times however the first result was dead on the money How to get a lot of iron in Minecraft? - in contrast this question was only on the 2nd or 3rd "page" of the Related Questions box so this is definitely helping.

Answer 3

TL;DR

When tags or title are not focused, the 'Similar Questions' should be refreshed and displayed by default.

Current Behavior

When you edit the title, you are given this side bar:

When you edit the tags, you are given this side bar:

When you edit the body, you get the similar questions side bar:

When you defocus title or tags, you keep whatever side bar you had. So if you were editing title, you keep info on what the title should be (even though you are no longer editing the title), and ditto with tags.

Issue

Tags can dramatically change the contents of the similar questions. If a user writes a question without any features identifying which language it is (writing a question about jquery not mentioning jquery), the sidebar questions will be very wrong until I enter tags.

Here is a very poor question which demonstrates the behavior:

How do I map multiple items together in to a CSV?

I want to use .map() to combine multiple items in to a CSV (comma-delimited) output.

For instance, if I use this code, I can get a list of all <div> elements in the SO main page:

$(#question-summary > div).map().group().join()

However, what if I want to get the info for question score, views, number of answers, and question title on a single line of the CSV (an element of the array produced by the above code)?

This gives me the following sidebar focusing on CSV:

But as soon as I add the jquery tag, I get much more relevant results:

Suggestion

Since tags are usually edited last, and can have a significant impact on the quality of the results, it would be much more user-friendly if losing focus on title or tags would by default show the Similar Questions (refreshed of course) as if the user had clicked back on the body again, since this is the most important info.