Finding the right SE site for a problem

Question

I am not sure how to make a suggestion. I will position the problem and then a solution/idea. Even if my idea would be adopted there may still be a problem, but I am just trying to close the gap.

Problem:

As a new user it is not obvious how to use SE. As an intermediate user it is not obvious which site to use in each situation, and also probably the same for even an advanced user, somewhat of an impossible problem to solve. Sure photography/physics/math to name a few are easy to find which site to use.

My issue was in Office 365 & OneDrive, there is no 365/MS/OneDrive SE. So I came to this link. https://stackexchange.com/sites# and found all sites, and this did not offer me any help for my Office 365 OneDrive issue.

Ideas:

1. When hovering over a site load a word cloud of the site tags inside the site (bubble).
2. Make the tags searchable, filterable, to help find the site which uses that word the most.

This way the punters can find a good site, easier, when trying to be diligent SE users.

However I just searched for these tags:

• "office365" SO=7k tags used, and SU=1k
• "onedrive" SO=2.5k, SU=750

This would suggest SO would be my best place to ask my question, however I got told to take my question to SU. So maybe my theory is wrong, maybe SO is naturally higher because of the larger usergroup?

My question: Was this the right content to post here?

Answer 1

when hovering over a site load a word cloud of the site tags inside the site (bubble).

Would this really help more than searching for tags? Just some numbers I got from looking at the tags pages on three sites: SO has ~64.3k tags, SU has ~6.4k tags, even a 'small' site like Interpersonal Skills has almost 300 tags. There's no way you can show all of those in a bubble of tags, and still clearly convey what a site is about.

For example, Stack Overflow has a java tag. But questions about Java would be off-topic. A tag alone does not convey the topic of a site.

Make the tags searchable, filterable, to help find the site which uses that word the most.

I also don't think this would help. After all, you manually did the same and still picked the 'wrong' site. I wrote a bit about thist before: The number of questions in a tag doesn't say much about the site's suitability for your question, without taking into account the size of site it's on, and without taking into account the actual topic of the site.

SO may indeed have more questions in a tag just because there are more questions on SO in general. That doesn't mean everything that could be tagged with such a tag would automatically be on-topic on SO.

While word clouds with relation to a site are a nice idea (they can give more information about a site's topic than "Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers" or "Q&A for computer enthusiasts and power users" does), they should be based on more than just the tags used on a site.

Answer 2

One way of implementing this in accordance with what you are asking, (but without making a lot of modifications), is to add a new Search Bar to the Stack Exchange main All Sites - Grid View:

That webpage normally displays different sized site logos based on the site's size.

It wouldn't be too difficult to resize the logos based on the number of search hits returned; giving an indication of the site's popularity for a given search.

You could tap/mouseover on one of the sites to see what sort of results were being returned, and possibly tweak the terms used, to narrow down the search and redisplay the icon cloud: