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We've been having an interesting debate over whether some of the flagged answers to this really popular question should be deleted since they don't answer the premise of the question.

Taking a step back, I started to look at how it was that an answer was upvoted over 100 times when it doesn't meet the general premise of the question, and then I looked at the title:

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So what happens if I search for that?

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No doubt someone who searches for their issue will think this is the answer. That becomes even more evident when you look at one of the highly upvoted answers:

enter image description here

Even the commenters on the answer don't realize they're commenting on an answer that doesn't really address the question! Surely the voters, do, right?

enter image description here

Nope. Only 10 downvotes, 3 of which in the past day (others months and years ago).

All of this illustrates a continuing problem we have on Stack Overflow:

Titles are terse, and they don't always explain the problem the user actually has.

Not only is this particular title problematic for the asker, it's problematic for the hundreds of thousands of people who visited this question, hoping it would contain their answer.

enter image description here

Titles should reflect the actual problem a poster has; not a truncated form meant for Google juice. If a question title isn't helpful to the average searcher, it's not helpful for us.

Titles are the single most important part of the question for a search engine and for the human eye. If the title doesn't accurately reflect the problem, then it should be edited to do so.

Do you agree, disagree with this assertion? If you disagree, why?

Is there another take on this I'm missing?

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    Yes, titles are important. Editing titles are also very hard. Many people may not know how to create a quality title for a post, even if they know enough to fix some misspelled words or fix the code's formatting. – Servy Aug 11 '14 at 19:44
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    PRO TIP: When you're posting a question, write your title first. Check the possible duplicates. If there isn't one, write the body of your question. Then go back and put in a better title for the body that you wrote. "Fooing the bar" is not a sufficient title if your question is really "I'm getting baz error while fooing the bar;" Google searchers will be sad. – Robert Harvey Aug 11 '14 at 19:54
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    @RobertHarvey I nearly yelled at you before I read the italicized bit. Now I want to form a mob of people who are willing to carry you around on their collective shoulders. – Pops Aug 11 '14 at 20:04
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    +1; To add: I think an explanation, which ties back to your Google search example, for why the answer voters aren't aware that the answer doesn't answer the OP: I think that, beyond that first few days where people are actually trying to answer the question, pretty much everybody who finds it finds it through Google as you say. Then, they simply upvote the answer if they found it helpful for their question -- that is, whatever they typed into Google. There is really no reason for a person to type their question, then read the OP's question, let alone judge appropriateness of the answer. – Jason C Aug 11 '14 at 20:07
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    (And a lot of people are using Eclipse. For people that weren't; I imagine the tendency is to just upvote the one they find helpful and completely ignore - i.e. not even downvote, especially if they don't have the rep for it - the ones that they didn't.) – Jason C Aug 11 '14 at 20:09
  • looking at this question makes me feel that canonical guidance given by Jeff Atwood in How aggressively should we maintain and improve very popular questions? has been totally forgotten. Pretty sad. Question in question has 270+K views, there are barely a thousand questions like that of 7+ millions total, guess this is rare enough to give it special treatment – gnat Aug 11 '14 at 20:36
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    Looking at that example, and how many people it has helped coming from Google, it has obviously been a useful contribution to the subject. Disagree entirely it should have been deleted, as it supplemented the accepted answer nicely. Its now hidden in a comment. – cowls Aug 12 '14 at 9:22
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    @Cowls I agree; it answers the question posed in the title; and the title is what Googlers are going to look for. That's why it's crucial that the title reflect the actual question asked. – George Stocker Aug 12 '14 at 13:10
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Yes, titles matter. You give an example of a highly up voted question with a misleading title. I don't think those are the questions with the worst titles. I have suggested that the worst titles can be found on questions with few up votes but many views. I call these click bait, because the many views suggests their title drew viewers in, but the few up votes per view suggests their content was not useful to those viewers.

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