That’s a good practical suggestion.
I believe them. The problem lies in the default searching option in my view.
Change it from keywords to title.
The title search is vastly more useful and is what I use to detect duplicate articles, and I suspect the same to many of those that enjoy pointing them out.
I agree--that many people probably use a keyword search instead of a title search, that I too use a title search more often than I use a keyword search, and that the title search should be the default. The keyword search can be effective in its way, but its usefulness and power really depend (more than a title search does) on the users' diligence and even good spelling.
(Sometimes people don't add keywords at all. Sometimes people add silly keywords without adding anything more useful for searching or categorization. Sometimes people seem to add only keywords that aren't in the title, but also adding significant title words as keywords makes more sense than omitting them. The keyword search, the title search, and topics are really three different groups. A thread with "Canada" in the title does not automatically become a thread with "Canada" in the keywords or "Canada" in the topics.)
In my observation, many duplicate articles are a result of inaccurate or incomplete keyword lists that don't quite literally have the entire title of the article embedded in the keyword system.
The keyword search also works differently. If I enter two or more words with spaces between them ("white house"), sometimes the search interprets my entry as a single keyword that combines the single words ("whitehouse"). Other times, such a keyword search does change to a title search, but the user needs to be able to catch what's happening.