OK, this is to stir up some discussion over the conclusion made inThe search engine seems to encourage adding language tags to titles
I totally agree with the argument that search engines encourage adding language tags to titles, and don't quite agree with the provided answer.
Please consider, that most people do a search, they tend to search from search engines first, instead of directly do searching in Stack Overflow. Encouraging searching within Stack Overflow aside, which is another topic, but currently the fact is most people search from search engines first.
So it appears that the conclusion from the above answer is:
Bad: PHP: How can I redirect users to different pages based on session data
Good: How can I redirect users to different pages based on session data in PHP?
However, this is where I disagree. Think of the case I'm searching for "redirect to different pages" using Java, or C#, or whatever, then I have to wade through the long title till the end to find what the question is for.
- This is not very friendly to users searching for answers. I know some people will argue that "you can always find the language at the end", however, this is not always the case. Nobody can guarantee that.
- What is worse, when the title is this long, the ending part will be trimmed from the search engine prompt, so you have no idea what the question is about from the search engine hit.
The above is what I always bump into when doing searches for Go language. Here is a concrete example:
We can see that,
- For the two hits on the bottom, people would have no idea which language the question is about because the title is so long that the ending part are trimmed from the search engine prompt
- For the two hits in the middle, people have to wade through the long title to find which language the question is for.
- For the hit on the top, I think that is the recommended way to do, as people would know within a split of a seconds that this is a Go question.
The hit on the top is what I put in as the title, unfortunately, someone took the "Go:" out from it. So the next time people search, they will have no idea which language the top hit is, and they have to open it up to see.
All I'm trying to say is, Let's make it as friendly as it can be to help people searching. Thanks for understanding.