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I posted this question after searching a few times(through Google and within ELU Search).

Turns out , it had already been asked and answered before here and consequently, my question was marked as duplicate.

My disappointment lies in the fact that even the Questions that may already have your answer dynamic list did not match my question to the already existing one. I guess it matches tags and few words from the title and body to populate the list.

  • Do I need to configure anything additionally to get the most appropriate matches?

  • What are the best practices to avoid duplicates, as someone who wants to ask?

I can only search a few times but I need some support from the SE's search algorithms to come up with the questions that already exists. It will save everyone's time I believe.

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    I have similarly noted the difficulty in the SO search (either the search box or the auto search when typing a question title). And google's seems to do much better (once the question is google-indexed). Search engine behavior needs a lot of tweaking to do well.
    – Mitch
    Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 17:35
  • When I searched the keywords "horse distraction", I found the duplicate question. How did you search? You can try with fewer but most relevant keywords. However, search mechanism is not perfect and you can google also like "site:english.stackexchange.com horse eyes".
    – ermanen
    Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 17:42
  • One only has to view "related" questions on EL&U (not so much meta) to see how totally unrelated they are to the OP's question. EL&U's search tool is quite bad, but I'm sure searching horses, eyes, and straight in the search box would have shown up the older question.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 18:18
  • I too found the duplicate for OP's question straight away using a Google "site-specific" search. But that's because I already knew the answer, so I just searched for blinkers and there it was at the top of the results returned. Doubtless it would have been the same if I'd happened to search for blinders using Google, but the "original" is the third result returned by the SO site search facility anyway, and apparently OP did already know this term (and was looking for alternatives). I don't really see a problem here.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 18:38
  • Related: A new search engine for Stack Exchange at MSE.
    – choster
    Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 22:52

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