In this ideas board, we seem to have a lot of problems with duplicates. As has been discussed in duplicate threads. Sigh. They've discussed and rejected all sorts of ideas about enforcing searching, and being able to give negative kudos.
My idea is trying to deal with a smaller group of duplicate creators: those who search and find nothing like their idea, but it is then later marked as a duplicate, just because they haven't searched for the right words. I propose that when a user searches for an idea like theirs, that not only should the board be searched for those terms, but for synonyms of those terms. For example, "phones" would also search for "mobiles".
Obviously, I'm not expecting GG staff to enter every synonym into the workings of the search box. Instead, this could be another element open to the community, for us to add in synonyms that we find are missing. Not sure how that would work into payback points, but I'm sure that can be considered later.
Another thing I'm not sure on is how easy or cheap this would be to implement! However, the idea still stands, and kudos if you like it 
-PTM
