Out of curiosity, does anyone ever use tags on Stackoverflow? Does anybody use search on Stackoverflow? Does anybody ever use in-site search on any website, instead of just using Google?
Otherwise you're just playing "fastest gunslinger in the west" trying to answer generic stuff before anyone rather than sniping questions you genuinely find interesting and can teach you.
I think there are two kinds of SO users - those that ask questions when they have problems, and answer questions when they solve them; and those that find questions to answer (for internet points, kudos, product support etc). Tags mainly help the latter.
I had a daily practice of looking at the tags of my language of desire `R` and `Python` to see the kind of incoming questions and the variety of answers coming at different instance of time. This is like a break from my full time work let's say after I finish a task or something. Somehow this has helped me improve my coding.
Stackoverflow may be the only site where I ever use tags. Tags are useful there for finding questions you can answer. You can watch tags of topics that you probably can reply to and browser the front page with a collection of interesting questions. Or look up the new questions page of a specific tag.
The same could probably done with search terms saved to your profile, but the tags are a much more organized alternative.
Yes, tags are mandatory when posting a question and useful when looking for questions to answer.
And yes, Google is worse than useless, it doesn't even search for what I type in, and when I force it to do that, it returns SEO spam websites, bot-farmed-content, clickbait and advertising ahead of useful content. Or instead of useful content.
That's weird, Stackoverflow is almost always my first result. Perhaps by accident you clicked on those spam websites too often and now Google thinks you love them.
As for asking, I suppose if my question has never been asked before by someone else, I'd rather not know the answer.
You are expected to put a few tags on a question if you ask one and normally some editor person will mangle your English to remove the nuance that your question was really about to possibly also update the tags to maybe not quite fit your question. This is remarkably unappreciative, however, it is interesting how any website that gets established garners an army of helpers who do these things. Wikipedia being the classic for this expertise-ism.
So even if tags are not your thing then whatever question you see on StackOverflow will be fully tagged up. If the software doesn't suggest some when asking some keen person will add them in.
If you are interested in a particularly obscure software package that does not have its own StackOverflow site then you will fond the square bracket search option (for the tags) is a good way of finding out what is new in that niche and what cool features or tips you can borrow for your own project.
At a guess the unrelated questions - 'top network questions' - are more likely to get clicks than the SO search box. So, to answer your question, the answer is 'no'. Aside from the one DDG user on HN that maintains a gopher site and the really computer-phobic uncle that uses Bing! with Windows XP the whole English speaking world is using Google.
I used to have a rss subscription on a obscure SO tag I was interested years ago. The tag had like a couple of posts a week, and I would read the question in the rss reader and click on what I am interested in.
So tags probably do not work well on a popular topic, but outside of that, they can be useful.
You don't use tags for searching for answers. You use tags to browse questions on topics you know a lot about and you have a high chance of being able to answer. Most of the questions on stack overflow I know nothing about so I browse the ruby tag where a lot of the questions are in the range of what I could answer.
Thats why they have the requirement for a tag "Could someone be an expert in this tag?"
