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https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/google

Found this being used as a tag on several questions. I don't really think a company (or even if it is being used as a tag for the search engine exclusively) is a good tag for the UX Site. Should we remove it?

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    Hm, there's an apple tag too. I think it's meta tag since it's apparently about the company, not the look and feel/etc. android is very relevant, I can't see a use for google as a tag. – Ben Brocka Aug 29 '12 at 20:54
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There are a lot of non-UX tags in our tag-wiki and we need to think why they exist. Users (with the privilege) create tags by themselves to sort information among these 5000+ questions. A tag being used on five or more questions is relevant in some context (maybe not UX, but on another facet).

Still, questionable company and company-feature tags are around in our tag wiki. Like the following (non-comprehensive) list:

22, 9, 126, 20, 7, 9, 22, 108, 27, 16, 14, 8.

The Windows tag is noted by the DO NOT USE wiki, but I doubt it has the desired effect.

I think we should be very careful if we’re going to change or remove tags, especially if they are used a lot. They will most certainly come back leading to the doubtful work to sort tags out again and again. I think the best option is to leave them as they are, since it helps our users to sort questions (and answers).

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    Platform tags are fine; there are important unique aspects about designing for Windows 8, OSX etc. Windows is marked do not use because it's ambiguous and I'm not done editing it out of existence yet. – Ben Brocka Aug 30 '12 at 12:04
  • @BenBrocka Nice! I agree that the Windows-tag is amiguous, and needs to be corrected. Do you want a helping hand on editing the posts tagged windows, let me know. – Benny Skogberg Aug 30 '12 at 18:41
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    We could probably edit bomb them this weekend. Feel free to do just a couple a day though. Alternate tags are window (GUI element) and windows-os for the desktop OS – Ben Brocka Aug 30 '12 at 19:26
  • I'll do just that. – Benny Skogberg Aug 30 '12 at 19:46
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Tags exist to help people find stuff and subscribe to things they're interested in. So a [google] tag sounds useful to me. I know I think Google design is fascinating and I work with a lot of their software, so it's useful to me that it exists (I also added a few of those tags).

I don't think we should make any kind of rules like "tags of companies aren't allowed". Tags that make sense should be allowed, regardless of whether they're a company or not.

As for some of the others, like windows-phone-7: that's a platform we as designers target. So it's very relevant to the questions here as some design must obviously be changed for specific platforms and will lead to questions specific to that platform.

When you see a tag, ask yourself this question: is the word in the tag related to the question? Is the question about this word? If I wanted to find this question in a search, would I use words used in this tag? If I wanted to subscribe to questions similar to this one, would this tag be useful?

  • Another question to ask, and more important that just about all of the questions you list is "Is there a better tag than this for this question?" – Charles Boyung Aug 30 '12 at 15:13
  • And in reviewing the questions you put in this, I would say that very few of the questions tagged with Google (at least the questions that should actually be kept open on UX) really should be tagged that way. The question is almost invariably about a specific Google application and even then, only about a specific feature of that specific application. In those cases, a more general (yet more specific) tag is far more valuable. – Charles Boyung Aug 30 '12 at 15:16
  • If there's a better tag, you're free to add it. But it's not necessarily true that the existence of a better tag means that this one is not useful. Questions can support multiple tags, after all. – Rahul Aug 30 '12 at 16:25
  • But there IS A limit to the number of tags a question can have, and it is far better to have a few good tags, rather than a bunch of completely useless ones. – Charles Boyung Aug 30 '12 at 16:29
  • @CharlesBoyung if I wanted to subscribe to questions about the suite of Google's web apps (Gmail, Google Drive, etc., etc.), it's convenient to have a combined tag available to me to do so. – Kit Grose Oct 10 '12 at 22:48
  • @KitGrose - But that's not Google. Google is far more than that, and even if that's what you were looking for (for some very strange reason), the Google tag would not be that helpful to you. – Charles Boyung Oct 11 '12 at 1:00

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