In my experience the search box in Close as duplicate dialog is almost useless.
For example we have a canonical malware removal question. Its score is 454 as I'm writing this. It has over a dozen highly-scored answers, including an accepted one.
Yet when I want to close a malware removal question as a duplicate of this one, I can't find it easily - I usually paste its URL into the search box.
- Searching for "malware" returns a bunch of questions for me, with the most upvoted one among them being closed with a score of 14. The list also includes a few questions with negative score.
- "how to remove malware": Yields three highly-upvoted questions (>40), but not the one I'm looking for.
- "how can i remove malware": Finally, the canonical question is the first result. But the search isn't very useful if I have to remember the title word for word.
Am I misusing the search box somehow? If yes, maybe it should be made more user-friendly?
What could we do to improve the situation?
- order results by decreasing score?
- boost questions with accepted answers?
- consider how many times a question was bookmarked?
- something else?