Similar Projects is built from your project's own text, not from its discipline alone and not from who made it. UNI indexes the published version of every project and compares them by meaning. The strip comes back empty when none of the closest matches share a discipline with the project you are looking at.
The match is made on text, not on tags
The text UNI indexes for a project is the title and description of its published version, the names of its disciplines, the names of everyone on the team, its location down to city, province and country, and the text UNI has read out of its images. That whole block is compared for meaning. Two projects can be paired on phrasing, subject matter or place without sharing a single tag, which is the usual reason a match looks odd at first glance.
Closeness is not the only thing in the ranking. 70% of the score is the text match. The other 30% is split evenly three ways: how recently the project was updated, how many likes and views it has, and whether UNI has marked it editorial. A recent or heavily viewed project can therefore sit above a closer match.
Only published, public projects are candidates
A draft is never considered. Neither is a project set to private. If a specific project you expected to see is missing, check that it is published and public before looking anywhere else. See How to create and publish a project and changing a project to private.
Why the strip can be empty
UNI returns up to 15 closest matches, and the page then keeps only those sharing at least one discipline with the project you are viewing. Some disciplines carry very few published projects. When yours is one of them, all 15 can be discarded and the strip renders as nothing.
Two things help:
- Add a broader discipline to the published version. A wider discipline gives the filter something to keep. How many disciplines a project can have covers the limit.
- Give a new or edited project time. Indexing runs in the background after you save, and the strip's response is held for 30 minutes before it is recalculated.
The strip opens with four cards and Load more takes it to eight. Fifteen is the most the server will ever put forward, so the strip is a sample of near neighbours rather than a complete list of related work.