Would it be worthwhile to incorporate a tag search?

February 2, 2006 8:43 AM

Would it be worthwhile to incorporate a tag search as part of the post new thread process? I'm picturing it comparing the tags chosen for a new post to previously tagged threads, and displaying a list of threads with two or more tags in common.
posted by GhostintheMachine to Feature Requests at 8:43 AM (8 comments total)

I'm picturing it as its own standalone thing, found on the main mefi search page
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:10 AM on February 2, 2006

I like it. Rather than having a cutoff by number of tags, have posts sorted by number of matching tags. (A single-tag match might be very relevant if it's a sufficiently rare tag.) If you want to get really spiffy, assign each tag a score based on rarity (less common tags getting a higher score), and rank matching posts based on the total score of those tags. So if I used the tags "art music broccoli maxthon," a post with the tags "broccoli" and "maxthon" would be sorted higher than one with "music" and "art."
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:23 AM on February 2, 2006

I'm picturing it as its own standalone thing, found on the main mefi search page
posted by mathowie at 12:10 PM EST on February 2 [!]

Good idea. Also, please let us browse more than just the 150 most popular tags.
posted by caddis at 9:50 AM on February 2, 2006

Also, please let us browse more than just the 150 most popular tags.

Yes, please. Maybe the list of tags could be paginated like everything else?
posted by Gator at 10:08 AM on February 2, 2006

Unfortunately, it's a pretty intense query to do that many counts, so doing live paginated results probably isn't going to happen anytime soon.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:00 AM on February 2, 2006

Can't it be indexed?
posted by caddis at 11:26 AM on February 2, 2006

I was just chatting with a co-worker about user-derived ontologies and metafilter's tagging system. The hype around ajax generally makes me twitch, but I think this is a great potential use of it. I'm envisioning a look ahead as you type function that shows existing tags that match what you are looking for along with a count of the number of times they've been used.

This would have the benefit of increasing the likelihood of people agreeing on tag nomenclature while still allowing people to create new tags as required. I think that some tags would achieve sort of a critical mass that would make them really useful but it wouldn't require a top-down structure of "choose from these tags".

I think it could be done efficiently by 1) creating a view of the appropriate query and 2) exporting the information to an xml file on a periodic basis (say twice a day) so that it doesn't require a hit to the db every time someone is making a post.
posted by afflatus at 11:33 AM on February 2, 2006

I just want a field to type in a tag and go to it, so I don't have to go to some other tag and change the URL directly.
posted by smackfu at 11:39 AM on February 2, 2006