Why are 'Tags' required?

[Steerpike]

I don't start too many threads as there are usually plenty of good ones around already, but today I started a new one, and I was required to provide a 'Tag' below the 'Title'.  But there was no list of keywords to choose from, no hints or suggestions, so I had no idea what the purpose was. I ended up putting in something not very helpful. 

 

So ... what is the intent of the 'tag', and what are some useful examples? 

[Aaron44126]

See -

Basically to help add keywords that search engines can latch onto.

[Reciever]

It helps our search engine and also to be brought up on external search engines like google. 

[Steerpike]

8 hours ago, Reciever said:

It helps our search engine and also to be brought up on external search engines like google. 

I'm strongly in favor of 'keywords' to aid in searching.  But this forum is well structured to begin with, and I'm already aware of the value of 'good thread titles', so this seems a bit redundant, as a 'required' field.  In my case, I created a thread titled "Windows 11 'Start Menu' changes"; appropriate tags would be, I presume, 'Windows 11' and 'Start Menu' - but those are already in the title which I presume is just as likely to be picked up by Google search indexing. So I was a bit puzzled by what tags I could add to 'further enhance' the post. However, I fully support the concept, so I'll try to create helpful tags from now on, even if they duplicate the thread title! 

 

Edit To Add: I see that they also aid in cross-forum searching if you click on the tag, so that's potentially useful: 

 

  

[Sandy Bridge]

Indeed, from a user (not search engine) standpoint, the main benefit is it lets you easily find other threads with the same tag.  Maybe I want to find other "windows 7" threads, or "music" threads, for example.  For this forum in particular, it can be used to tag the model of laptop in question.

 

On forums that don't require tags, you're at the mercy of the search engine, which will often pull in other threads that only mention "windows 7" in the body for example.  Or they might decide "7" is fewer characters than their minimum search term length of 3 (a restriction I've run into on some forums).

 

They'll probably become more useful over time as we acquire more threads.  On the old NotebookReview forum, where in its heydey there would be many threads per laptop, having the laptop tagged would have been great - find the entire world's cumulative knowledge about your laptop with one tag.