How technically difficult would it be to pull related questions from other stacks into the right-side Related Questions on Law.SE?

Question

Example: Medical right to privacy- HIPAA has a list of Related Questions in the right column. Would it be feasible to pull related questions from other stacks into that right column list, e.g., Can a past psychiatrist share information with your current psychiatrist? from Health.SE?

Please note that I am not suggesting that we migrate related questions from other stacks into Law.SE--just link to them if they are indeed related.

If I had to rate Feature Requests, I would give this a 'medium' rating, i.e., it would be a helpful addition to consider down the road, provided it is not a technical nightmare.

Answer 1

If I'm understanding your request properly, that wouldn't be possible.

The Related Questions list you see in the sidebar is actually auto-generated. If I remember right, that list is auto-generated by finding questions that share similar titles and tags.

But on other sites, such comparisons may not be feasible. The current system, and any future simple system would not be able to connect the two questions you mentioned. They carry different titles and tags (remember, different sites may use different tags), so they wouldn't be matched easily. Connecting other sites could also bring many false positives (I mean, a related question for your request is "Add tag for "tax" for tax law questions - not really about what you're asking).

What you can do, is link to related posts on other sites in the network as comments below the post. It's easier to just do that, since there's that human factor that can really tell us if the questions are actually related as well :)