How to filter for questions that had a bounty on them?

Question

I enjoy serendipitously learning new stuff based on answered questions on CV. But given the volume of questions a day, I end up only sampling from the newest questions, which are more likely than not unanswered.

I would like to sample from questions that HAD a bounty on them. That would increase the probability that the question was interesting (at least to someone) and was answered in detail!!

On that note, just filtering for questions that had ACCEPTED answers would also be useful.

EDIT: Thank you all. Great answers. And the use of badges is a great idea.

Answer 1

There are good answers here with respect to your explicit question. However, implied by your overt question is a latent question 'how can I find more of the best CV questions and answers than just surfing the main page?' Should you be interested, one strategy is to skim through the list of recent badges on the badges page for nice (etc.) questions and answers. There are more ideas along these lines here: How should new users navigate Cross Validated to learn more about statistics?

Answer 2

Are you familiar with the Advanced Search options? They help a lot filtering questions (and answers).

For example, if you want to search for questions with accepted answer type in the search field box:

hasaccepted:1 (click me).

To search for questions with accepted answers and which were not closed or put on hold type:

hasaccepted:1 closed:0 and so on with other options.

Unfortunately, there is not a current advanced search option customized for threads with awarded bounties. As I think you already know one can search for current open bounties in the featured tab.

One option for searching bounties on old threads is the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. The link is a query which should retrieve the top 200 bounties (regarding amount of reputation). It is not very organized though. Some threads (specially the oldest, for example, from 2010) do not contain bounties. Maybe in such situations, it was opened a bounty but they were not awarded. If you go to the top bounties (500 rep, 200 rep) you will see they were actually awarded.

Hope this helps you to get started. Good luck. Good learning.

Answer 3

It's possible to extract the number of bounties awarded (regardless of reputation transferred) with this query. The top 10 questions by number of bounties + 1 for an accepted answer are:

Examples where method of moments can beat maximum likelihood in small samples?
Conditional inference trees vs traditional decision trees
Negative binomial regression question - is it a poor model?
Why is Mantel's test preferred over Moran's I?
Root finding for stochastic function
Mixed model vs. Pooling Standard Errors for Multi-site Studies - Why is a Mixed Model So Much More Efficient?
Selecting PCA components which separate groups
Why the F-test in Gaussian linear models is most powerful?
Longitudinal comparison of two distributions
Boundary effect in a wavelet multi resolution analysis

In some cases the bounty expired without being awarded because there were no answers given before the bounty expired.

Enjoy!