How do you look for duplicates of a question?

Question

I am looking for tips how to find out if a question is (possibly) a duplicate. I see how I can use my "google fu" to do it, and I am certain that many of you "know" it just by reading the question. Do you search for every question?

Answer 1

1. Skim the questions in the Related sidebar, sometimes it is that obvious.
2. Type a very abbreviated version of the question in the search bar, check the first 2-3 results. This doesn't even need to be a complete sentence or grammatically correct.
3. Look for any code/error messages in the question. Copy these verbatim into the search window. If that doesn't work, try removing the parts of the message that are variable (like exact /dev/... names or packages)
4. Replace generic terms like photo viewer with Eye of Gnome or Shotwell, and search again.
5. Check the OP's profile, I frequently find several variants of the same question (not necessarily a bad thing, they are refining their attempts to get an answer by re-posting rather than editing the original).
6. Just plain-old remembering very common questions, frequently used as the duplicate to link to.
7. Ask in chat. Crowd-source the effort if you are sure it's a dupe but can't find the exact one.
8. @Seth's comment above: click flag or close and check the suggestions that come up in the Duplicate dialog, see if the suggested dupes that come up are a match. For a tip on searching there, see How do I quickly find the duplicate questions I'm searching for when flagging/closing?
9. Add tags to your search terms using square brackets, eg [kernel] [disk-usage]
10. If you know a particular user often answers questions about this topic, go to their profile so that their userID appears in the search box, then add the tag and/or keyword to the search box, eg user:93977 [uefi] GPT
11. Exclude answers from the search using is:q
12. Google with site:askubuntu.com