That's right, the freeform search looks mainly at titles and subtitles. But tag search looks at all tags that are used by enough people. They don't have to be given special status, just somewhat popular. And a tag only used by one or two creators simply doesn't cut it.
Viewing post in How to promote your game. anyone???
Is it automatic? I mean is it possible for new tags to start appearing there on their own, whenever they become used by enough pages, or does each and every tag require a manual input, by the people behind itch.io, before it has a chance it can be found in the 'browse all tags' page. I assumed the latter, and by 'special status tags', i was referring to those tags which can be found there.
The portal would perhaps benefit from a tag search of the kind I meant, anyway. for example, for my game I considered adding an 'history' or 'historical' tag, but having no way to see which one of the two is already the most shared by the most projects, if any, I decided to stick with suggested tags, even though they were less relevant.
Far as I know it's automatic. All that admins do is mark some of them as denoting engines/tools or genres, so they can be used in more ways. And for what it's worth, the tag field on a project's edit form should have autocompletion, so you can at least see which tags and tag forms are popular enough (if not how popular exactly) and make a decision.