Most of the time, you don't want to see unanswered questions in the duplicate dialog, since you can't normally close as a duplicate of unanswered questions. This behavior is intended, at least as it says [here](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/165933/323179):

>The search results include only answered questions (per the usual SO definition of "answered", where the question must have an accepted or up-voted answer).

But there are times when you can close against something unanswered:

- On meta
- Questions with the same author

But the dialog doesn't show unanswered posts in those circumstances.

In the past, I have wondered why I was mysteriously unable to find some specific posts in the duplicate dialog. For example:

- I saw two near-identical posts by the same user. I was unable to find the duplicate in the dialog, even after typing in the exact tile or using the `user:1` search trick.

- On meta, [this post of mine](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/331867/6083675) does not show up in the dialog. I posted about this before, on [MSO](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/333315/6083675), but at that point I only knew it affected that one post (the joke's on whomever got rid of "too localized" I guess).

In both cases, I had to go get the URL and paste it in manually.

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The best way to see this is to use `answers:0`. I hope you don't think there are only two unanswered questions here!

>![2 results][1]

Most of the time, the results for this search are merged questions (but not all the merged questions). I have no clue why that one post shows up here. (Maybe it was merged and un-merged at some point?) This current behavior is pretty useless.

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It should be very easy to fix the dialog on meta. It might take a little more effort to have the same user's posts show up on main, but I can't imagine it being prohibitively difficult.

  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/n13WL.png