Commons talk:Requests for comment/improving search

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Comment

Comment - thank you for starting this page! I was looking for discussions about searching recently, and found that this had been created only recently. While some people claim that these discussions have been held before, as far as I can tell that is mainly not true; only as a side-topic in other topics, and one which is rarely resolved.

Search currently offers a limited experience; it is one of the areas most in need of an interface update in MediaWiki over the years and has often lagged behind other features in being improved. Questions of making searches more relevant, or helping cluster them, or helping them not show what seem to be extraneous images, are important. The ability to filter searches by namespace was a major improvement in its day :) I wonder if we could get some background information on the sorts of tricks Google and other search engines use to improve image search, and whether we could make use of some of them. --SJ+ 01:26, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

This may not be noticed by everybody. It should be posted to Commons:Requests for comment/improving search. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:24, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

What happened to Mayflower?

I asked this question before, but got no answer. So here we go again:

Would anyone know what happened to the Mayflower search tool? It apparently went down in late 2009, successively because of an outdated database and an expired Toolserver account. I went through the talk pages, VP archives, wikitech-l, nothing much.

Does anyone know what happened exactly? Could it be revived? Would it be worth it? What happened to the PHP sources?

Thanks, Jean-Fred (talk) 13:38, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

This may not be noticed by everybody. It should be posted to Commons:Requests for comment/improving search. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:23, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for consolidating search discussion

This is so much better because it is a more permanent location, and it is focused only on search. Versus being scattered around various multipurpose discussion archives. We can also create archives here when necessary. The good thing about that is that the archives here will only be for search discussions. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:01, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Can the Safesearch discussion be put on a separate page?

The page is very long, and taking a long time to load after edits. We need to spin off some pages. This search discussion has been so useful. It will be a shame to break up the rest of it too. But we need several pages.

Maybe we can break it up by topic if possible. All the pages can be put in search discussion categories to help find stuff. Is there some way to search the content of pages in a category? --Timeshifter (talk) 18:10, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

I tend to agree with putting the Safesearch discussion on a separate page. This SafeSearch discussion goes way off topic, it has a different objective than improving search and it is closely related to the discussion and brainstorming on meta:Controversial content. So maybe this should be a separate RFC, i.e. Requests for comment/SafeSearch? Or we could break up the current RFC into i.e. "Requests for comment/improving search/SafeSearch", "Requests for comment/improving search/A little bit of intelligence" etc. I don't know, but i agree that we need to keep the page useful and more concise. Other opinions? --Atlasowa (talk) 19:34, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

I moved it to Commons:Requests for comment/Safesearch. --Timeshifter (talk) 11:36, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Defaults and Special:Search

A recent change on Commons (or maybe just my machine) is that "Search" now defaults to finding the Category only. Special:Search is required to find any file of that name, but many, perhaps most, geographical images are badly categorised and so will not be found. I'll put a Special:Search link on my User Page, but is it possible to set my Preferences to do all searches with Special:Search, or to have another tab for it? Hogweard (talk) 20:03, 14 March 2013 (UTC)