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My video site offers full search functionality that searches based on title, description and tags.

I also have a category page that has 20+ categories to browse (each video is categorized as well as tagged).

I want to make a tag page that lists all the tags and the amount of videos that share that tag. This will help users who want to browse popular tags who wouldn't have known what to search.

I'm debating whether or not on this tag page to add a search within the page that allows users to filter through the list of tags. Similar to ux.stackexchange.com/tags. My site will have ~5k tags.

My first thoughts are if people KNEW what tags to search for they would just type them in the search box so having a search on the tag page itself is useless, right?

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  • Maybe you should introduce some general categories and add the tab structure into a tree structure for easier retrieval. That would reduce the need to know what the user is looking for and give them a shorter list of tags to read/search through.
    – Barfieldmv
    Apr 18, 2012 at 7:35

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  • ~5k tags are far too confusing for any users so it is sure that without a search field it would be almost impossible to handle

  • You should use a general search field (just like in YouTube) and maybe add among filter options ('Search among tags'). But if your built-in search engine is clever enough the results would be much more relevant to the search term if it weighs title, description, and tags as well

  • Generally, tags can be very confusing because all users use different tagging, for example, a funny video may be tagged - fun, funny, laugh, happy... etc

  • Just give users a popular videos page and don't confuse them with tags! See what YouTube does, it works after all. Just learn from them!

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  • it's more about browsing a more granular niche than just a high level category.
    – surpr
    Apr 18, 2012 at 13:46
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    In this case learn from huge adult video sites, how they do it! Don't try to reinvent things, what already work for others.
    – Roland Pokornyik
    Apr 18, 2012 at 13:54
  • Especially in case of adult content I think categorizing and a clever search field are enough, and than the 'small index pictures' and the 'title' will sell a video. There will be only, like 5% people looking for tags.
    – Roland Pokornyik
    Apr 18, 2012 at 13:56
  • Meanwhile the biggest free adult site right now only uses tags and doesn't even categorize. Which is why I'm launching this tag page in addition to categories. There's not much innovation when it comes to adult.. especially for user experience so usually copying the other guys doesn't help.
    – surpr
    Apr 18, 2012 at 14:25
  • then sorry :) I don't know de adult business that well (don't even know which is the biggest site)
    – Roland Pokornyik
    Apr 18, 2012 at 14:29
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In addition to what Roland said, unless your "just type a tag name" input handles substrings (like SE does), there is an additional value to search. Consider someone looking for cat videos -- yeah, he's doomed, but if he searches for "cat" you want him to find "funny-cat" too, not just "cat". Especially when tags are user-created, users cannot rely on consistent or logical naming patterns.

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