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After some recent changes whenever I open a question the page title reads <first-question-tag>-<question title>-Stack Overflow.
Tags are often quite long - for example there's visual-studio-2008 tag on SO. If browser uses tabs the tag might occupy all the tab width and no room for actual question title is left - this makes navigating between tabs inconvenient.
Sorry, this is absolutely necessary, otherwise we get demolished by scrapers using our own content in Google ranking.
For background you can read:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1985264
And:
As for "why not at the end of the title versus at the start", see
For anyone not aware of the problem with this, and why this "solution" exists for the "problem" that most users familiar with SO don't know about:
Report high-Google-ranking Stack Exchange content copiers here
quoting meta (so meta, no?)
for those of you seeing scrapers rank above #stackoverflow can you reply with your exact google query terms? (plain text only, no urls) Tweeted by codinghorror on December 9, 2010 at 7:59 AM
and
What to do when you find copied SF, SU or SO content on other websites?
Why these scrapers have higher ranks than the original stackoverflow pages in Google search results?
<title>have more weight (for confirmation see Rebecca's link, above) so prepending is optimal.