designing keyword/tag input

Question

I am currently working on a form and am stuck on a keyword/tag input field (think youtube.. or even stackoverflow). Anyway, I thought it was pretty logical to use ',' to separate the tags... which would allow users to use combinations of words as tags using ' '. However my boss wants it separated with just ' '. Which worries me as I think we will end up with millions of 'The' tags. Personally I like the tag system used here on stackoverflow... but its not up to me.

So far my only idea was to have a list of common words that would automatically be removed.... problem being is its an international site, so not much good making a list of English words.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you really can't convince your boss otherwise, I can only think of your dictionary idea coupled with scheduled maintenance. So, if you notice a word repeatedly being used, such as an equivalent of 'the', then you can blacklist it and remove it from current tags. Also, you could make it clear that words such as 'the' are not required and other words should be hyphenated (as is on SO).

Answer 2

As the user is typing in the keywords show a preview of the matched keywords right below. This might help clarify to the user that each word separated by spaces is a distinct keyword and that duplicates are eliminated.

Enter keywords: [[[ the house the boat the cat the coat ]]]
Keyword preview: [the] [house] [boat] [cat] [coat]
    *** Warning: Duplicate keywords found. To combine multiple words use a "-"