Once you merge an idea, the merged idea can still be accessed but it cannot be searched. That is confusing for customers who search for their original Idea's number. Is it possible to show the idea in the search, or the idea which it has been merged into, so that it doesn't appear as if the idea has just disappeared.
Great news! Merged ideas are now included in ideas portal searches.
Please return a method for searching merged child ideas through the portal. This was a surprise, and was removed from the product with very low customer input (6 votes).
The use case coming from my customers is that they saw an Idea that someone else submitted, maybe they even voted on it -- and now they are trying to locate it again.
It appears that the My Ideas, My Votes and My Subscription filters only display the parent Idea. If there was something unique in the wording of the child Idea they are looking for, they will have to dig through the merges.
I do all the initial triage on our site that contains a few thousand ideas. I'm probably rather aggressive on my merging so that we have nice, neat "families" of Ideas for our Product Managers on the full Aha side. However, I may have to re-think my merging strategy if users are unable to locate Ideas that may have some unique variations that they want to recall.