There’s so much potential for this feature to go beyond the basic implementation that is in place right now (i.e. a solution that can actually recognize topics and body content that is related/similar to other existing ones)…
Are there any plans to improve on this?
What did you have in mind, exactly?
Hey Jeff, this feature request was basically made with the idea that the similarity check often returned dissimilar topics. The way it appears to work is quite basic while it could in theory work similar to search as a pre-topic check to present forum members with topics that have been posted so they could instead consider contributing to an existing topic. While as of present, it basically just checks whether the number of characters in the forum title that are the same as in another forum title exceeds a certain number that can be changed in settings. Not sure if that clarifies what I had in mind but I hope it does :))
Hmm, I am not sure your description is correct? It does match against both title and first post body as I understand it?
Ah ok I see, great! That’s good to know – but I mean the fact that I didn’t notice perhaps proves the implementation is in some ways quite simple + could be improved.
A comparison that comes to mind is the default WordPress search built into the CMS vs. Elasticsearch. Now of course, the same way the suggestion wasn’t to say this feature is poor, the same way WordPress search serves its purpose in its own right, I just feel that particularly for informational & product-marketing forums having better matching for similarity checks would be a nice plus.
Right, I didn’t take it as a criticism, no worries there.
Google being so good at search has kinda spoiled people, who expect search to be that good… everywhere. I wish! Consider all the apps and sites that don’t do automatic misspelling correction in search – that is “simple” as a concept, yes, but think of all the websites and apps which don’t do this!
I guess what I’m digging around for is specific suggestions of little things we could do to improve it, such as
hey, are we factoring in the existing category / tag (if available) when doing a topic similarity search?
Glad to hear, sorry wasn’t sure for a second – didn’t want to risk it being taken the wrong way. 
That’s a great point actually, yeah. Also, to that end, I also can’t think of a comparable version of this in place with other software of this category. The only other thing that comes to mind is a few companies that have technical documentation that has some impressive search 