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I've spotted 3 or 4 questions which amount to "How do I do backups" in the past few days. This got me thinking about how to prevent really obvious dupes. One way might be to make searching the site easier / more obvious. What is the best way to do this currently? Could it be made easier.

  • Find a tag which relates to your question
  • Go to the "Ask a question" page and type your question
    • Search results for this are not very accurate, go try the backup question if you don't believe me, it doesn't treat "backup" and "back up" and "back-up" as the same word etc...

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Reset to default
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The search page lists all of the available options (including searching with tags) for use with the internal search tool (the box at the top right). The search page is also linked from the right side bar of the search results (as "See our search tips").

Otherwise, the Stack Exchange developers usually recommend just using Google (example). There are search boxes on the search page for custom searches on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

Proposals to make changes to the Ask Question search function probably need to be on Meta Stack Overflow (the support Q&A site for the software running all the sites in the Stack Exchange network).

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    Rofl, the border of the search bar has almost no contrast with the background, I was specifically looking for it and I didn't spot it!
    – Jeremy
    Commented Oct 17, 2010 at 23:56
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Here is the complete list of search tips.

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