I sometimes have to check exactly which tags I used for similar/related articles so they match. There could be 10 stories related to "red cars" but if someone puts just "red car" then the story is alone.
Perhaps a button near the tag entry that the user can click to find similar tags already in use.
That is the basic concept and I'm sure a lot more can be done with it. Maybe even an automatic parsing that the user doesn't know about.
I worked on this a couple weeks ago. I used some code from DHTML Goodies to insert tag words into their regular table and a second table to be used only for the purpose of listing tags. The result worked by inserting submitted tags into a separate database and grabbing and displaying words from this list in a drop down suggestion menu as you type out matching characters. This is in a very basic way like how Google shows suggestions as you type in search criteria. The mod worked well but there were two problems. The first was that this mod would only work if you listed only one word in the tag entry area. In order to list multiple tags we would have to rework the input area to let you have add additional input boxes for each word. I don't have a problem with this idea since some people are already confused about using commas to separate tags. The second problem was that Ash discovered that if you had a huge table of tag words it would significantly slow down your page load time.
After hearing that from Ash I altered my idea a bit. I decided that instead of automatically adding words and growing a huge list over time we could predefine the dictionary of words to limit the number of words to a more reasonable number. I then modified the install script for this to insert predefined words into the database table and to no longer input additional tags through user submission. This could work well, but you would still need to divide the input field up if you want a suggestion for multiple tags. At this point I completely through out the idea of using it for tags and decided that it would be useful for search input (which ChuckRoast mentioned to me). I changed the code around and made it so it would use the drop-down list for the search box using predefined keywords.
The result of this test can be seen at the link below which is only temporary:
http://test.fraxi.com/
Use the search box to see the demonstration. This example hasn't been modified to match the visual style of yget yet.
I'll make some final modifications to the code and post the mod on the forum sometime over the next week. I'm really busy until next weekend.
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