How Do I...???
Josh is discussing/suggesting an idea he has for the common problem of the same questions being asked over and over on forums. I've been moderators for different forums for the last 5 years so I have a lot of experience in this area. As Josh mentions, this is a big problem for all types of discussion boards. I've personally never been a fan of newsgroups. Besides the fact they seem so 1997, they don't really have administration that we underlings can participate in. Forums allow other "hired" moderators to push threads around where appropriate, delete duplicates and direct people to the right places. This is better, but still problematic and time consuming.
I think Josh's idea is a good one and really should be implemented, but I think it's just putting a band-aid on the problem instead of trying to fix the base problem, which IMO, is searching and finding what you're really looking for.
My suggestion would be for a way to go further than just saying "this was the best answer" (although this is a good improvement for sure). Once a "best answer" has been identified, allow moderators, employees, MVPs, etc to go in and add specific words (like Keywords for categorizing stuff in Windows Vista) like "IComparible, implment, base, class, compare, behavior" or "file, access, permission, io, read, write, problem", etc to that the "approved, best answer" post had in it (usually words that are in the post, but not necessarily and in no particular order). You could even extend this to as high as the actual forum section and add keywords like "visual basic, vb, .vb, basic, mybase, my" and other keywords to narrow down the search to a specific forum as part of the "smart search". Then, searching can become more categorized and prioritized. I think actually searching by text in a title can sometimes work, but not often, especially when you get titles like "i have vb code problem". :-\
I haven't read through all the comments on Josh's post, so if I'm duplicating what someone already said, please forgive me. However, this proves another good point. If the answer to a question can not be found in say, the first page of search results, the person will probably likely give up and just post the question (as I did, by being a slow reader and giving up and just posting a blog entry about his post without reading through all the comments to see if someone else already said something similar). Better ways of categorizing and searching are, IMHO, the REAL way to fix this problem.
I don't know if anything I've actually said would really improve searching (I'm not sure I'd call myself a search expert), but there's got to be a way to fix the core problem of finding what needs to be found. I'd bet that if you could make it so 80% of people could find the answer to their question (assuming there is an answer at all yet) in the first few entries, there would be no need to force people to search before posting or bring up ad-like results while they're already in the middle of typing up their question. Google is a great example of that. 99% of the time, I find what I'm looking for in the very first page of results. If I have to look further than that, I usually just rephrase my question and try again until I give up and message someone on my Messenger list or e-mail someone.
UPDATE: Damn, so of course, now I've gone back and read the comments on the post and whodathunkit, someone posted almost the same thing I just said. So much for being original! :P