Why this discrepancy?
--Sep 10 2015 11:26:09 GMT+0530 (IST)--
At that time, the API shows 42010 tags.
But the same thing computed on the Stack Overflow tags page is 44496.
Is it because of caching?
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1 Answer
There seem to be 2 or 3 effects, the biggest is that the Tags page also shows Synonyms.
There may also be a small cache effect, but there seems to be another discrepancy as well, possibly an error/bug.
You can see that the Tags page also shows Synonyms by:
- Go to the Tags page.
- Enter
userscrin the Type to find tags: box. - You will see something like:
- Then use the Synonyms pages to see that
userscriptis a synonym ofuserscripts, not a real tag. - The API call reflects this.
Combining the API's /tags route and the /tags/synonyms route, I currently get:
42020 + 2442 = 44462
If you count up all the tags on the Tags page(s), I currently get:
4 columns
* 9 rows
* 1236 pages
+ 10 on the last page (page 1237)
-----------------------------------
44,506
Which still gives a discrepancy of 44!
This is too big to be explained by caching. The Tags page seems almost real-time and the API count is updating at least once an hour.
The latest SEDE data is currently from Sep 6 at 6:11 (about 4 days ago) and SEDE shows that there were 44,377 tags + active synonyms at that time.
This suggests a growth rate of about 32 tags per day, or about 1.3 tags per hour -- which matches the observed increase in the API results.
This final discrepancy (44) is something else; quite possibly a bug.
Cross checking the Tag Synonyms page(s), set to the active tab gives:
24 pages
* 100 Synonyms per page
+ 42 on the last page (page 25)
-----------------------------------
2442
Which agrees with the API result.
