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.
:)