The tiniest of #ponies

March 3, 2015 2:23 PM

Well, perhaps not *that* tiny -- if one goes to the main Tags page, one finds a spiffy tag cloud of most-often-used tags. What I would love to see is the ability to enter a tag to search by -- say a text field with submit button.

As it stands now, unless I'm missing something, the only way to search by a tag not in the top X most popular is to click on one, then change the URL in the resulting location field.

posted by Celsius1414 to Feature Requests at 2:23 PM (5 comments total)

Thanks for the suggestion—we'll think about it.

In the meantime, there are a couple different ways to search for tags. You can put a term in the search field at the top of any page, click the button, and then click the "Tags" tab to see tag results for that word.

You can try the URL method you mentioned. And then if you get to a non-existent tag page, like this:

https://www.metafilter.com/tags/faketag

We include a search form there to help you build another tag URL. I could see adding something like that to the Popular Tags page for convenience.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:26 PM on March 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I use search-box then look-in-Tags-tab quite a lot, and find it useful too that it does partial matches: so frog also finds frogs and many other frog-related things. Although sometimes I'm frustrating that it doesn't do substring matches, so searching for frog doesn't find the leapfrog and leapfrogging tags.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:18 PM on March 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

i also want an option to search for tags that have never been used man I think I've made this joke at least twice before
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:54 PM on March 3, 2015

If I could have a tags pony it would only poll from the last 6 months. Or, maybe it would give a progressively higher score to newer tags, so that shit people talked about a decade ago wouldn't still be on there.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:15 AM on March 4, 2015

the only way to search by a tag not in the top X most popular is to click on one, then change the URL in the resulting location field.

Actually, you can skip the 'click on one' step. What's left is basically your pony: A text box (the URL bar) that you type the tag in and press 'Enter' to search.
posted by carsonb at 10:55 AM on March 4, 2015