There is a tag search, you say? I've been looking for it before, didn't find it. I guess it was hiding in plain view the whole time.
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.