How are tags ordered in the list?

Question

On pages like this one, if there are multiple tags that are used on the exact same number of questions, how are they ordered? Sorry for suddenly asking a bunch of pointless questions about tags, but still please don't question my curiosity.

Comments

I'm gonna assume it's the order the person wrote the tags in

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I think it's the thing users wrote the thing of the things in. Like thingie said.

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The first instance of it on the page is alphabetical, but the second one isn't; therefore, it cannot be alphabetically sorted.

I would assume it would be the order in which the Tags are created; as it would make sense for the site to order them that way if not alphabetically. Or, it could order them by some sort of source code, but that is incredibly unlikely and an unnecessarily redundant to do. :P

Answer 1

As far as I know it's just whatever order the database returns them in. Usually it's the order the items were added to the database, but it's not guaranteed. In programming when you fetch stuff from a database, it does a lot of magic behind the scenes to return results in the most efficient way possible, which can end up giving different ordering.

Comments

If I took classes about databases, would I learn what the "magic" really is?

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Haha probably not, I don’t know all the details myself, only a general overview. And there are many different databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, Oracle) and they all have their own magic :)

Still worth doing learning about them though if you’re interested in websites and programming!