Why so much concern over tags?

Question

There are many meta questions related to the various tags. I don't understand why they're useful in the first place.

I see two situations: 1. the question author uses a descriptive title and so the tags are essentially irrelevant; or 2. the question author uses a poor title, "Why does this happen?" springs to mind, and then even with good tags, there's still no good way to know what the question is about.

So clearly the point of the tags isn't to tell you what the question is about, but a way to look at all questions with a specific tag. I feel like search engines have solved this problem (none of them look at the keywords meta tag any longer). Why not leverage this power and simply omit the tags? No more worrying if a question should be tagged with latex or tex-core or macros or packagename or any other tag.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm missing some legitimate use for tags. Feel free to enlighten me (and point out how foolish I am for missing the blindingly obvious).

Answer 1

Tags help to find unanswered questions that you can answer.

For example, if you are the author of the "foo" package, you could add "foo-package" to your list of "interesting tags". Then you can easily see questions related to foo highlighted on the front page. Even better, you can go to "Unanswered / My tags" and quickly see all unanswered questions related to foo. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the "foo-package" tag.

Not everyone has time to have a look at the full list of questions regularly. And Googling for "foo" just returns old questions, most of which have already been answered. This site works only if people get good answers fast; tags can help tremendously in catching the attention of the right people.

Answer 2

They build relationships.

• Tags group questions into well-defined categories. We could use them to refine a search, connect them with users. Connect ourself with a tag where we're specialized in, subscribe to a tag. That's much easier than doing full text searches each day.

• Tags point out relations between subjects. For each tag we can see which other tags have often been used together with it. So, the top entries in the "Related tags" list might be interesting as well.

Answer 3

Tags are supposed to help your search for an answer when it's hard to write a short question, or when a question is asked in different ways.

For example, suppose there is already a question How do I change link styles in hyperref?. If you have the same problem, you're most likely to search for words like "colors", "hyperlink", "change default colours (note the different spelling!)", "hyperref", and probably some more. You'll probably never search for "style", or simply "link".

Now, what's the probability that you'd find this particular question if there are tens of questions?

Tagging helps when the question has not been asked in the most straight-forward and obvious way. Haven't you experienced the same yourself when using your favourite search engine with a rather long query, and get only useless results? Then you change some wording and you get exactly what you need on the first hit. This is where tagging comes into play --- to reduce your search space as much as possible before you've ever written your query, so that there's a chance you'd find existing poorly worded posts instead of writing your duplicate question.