IndexTank categories are not designed for the tags use case, and will not work properly. It's intended for a relatively small amount of categories for which each document has a single value. The amount of different values of a category can be large but the amount of categories cannot. If you want to implement something like tags, then each tag should be a category because you'll want more than a single tag per document. We were in the process of designing a new feature to support this kind of use cases, and maybe we'll start a branch to implement it and hopefully the community will colaborate.