Help talk:Searching

Geocoordinates

I'm not seeing a way to search in a particular part of the globe, but have found a method that gives a fairly high hit rate:

incategory:"Media with geo-coordinates needing categories" 40° 73° 59

for example gives me mostly western New York City, my home and area of interest. Moving the numbers farther west gives a big drop in hit rate; perhaps someone can suggest improvements. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:51, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Upcoming change to search - using the search bar will always go to results

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T235263

As you may recall, several years ago the wikis got a new search engine. Search has overall greatly improved the quality of life since release, but unfortunately it was never optimized for some of the sites like Commons.

There is an upcoming change related to this. Currently, when you use the search bar at the top of the page, if there is an existing page on Commons for that word the user will be taken to that page instead of the search results for the word. For example, if I come to Commons to look for a picture of a dog, I'll put "dog" in the search box. Instead of getting the results from Special:Search/Dog, I get the page Dog. This was not intended behavior for Commons; going directly to the page is behavior intended for Wikipedias. The intended behavior for Commons is what Special:Search does, which is present a list of potential matching files in addition to links to the page Dog. To be clear, when searching after this change, you will still be presented with the link to the page Dog as your first option.

This change will not be alone, there will be more changes in the future to how search is served on Commons. The benefit of manually curated pages when search results are messy can be clear, but it leaves out a significant amount of media. By making some changes over time, cleaning up the search results page will be beneficial. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Out of date

This page is out of date since the MediaSearch is standard search on Commons. It should be rewritten, or at least there should be a disclaimer at the beginning mentioning that this help is only applicable to Special:Search. -- Discostu (talk) 13:47, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Reverse Image (or other medias) Search

It would be really useful to search directy by image instead of keywords. Because for instance, if one searches "cat"(english) It doesn't necessarily appear also the same image but renamed "ድመት" (amharic) among the results. So it would be helpful an automatic media tagging like in Wikidata items or lexemes. Honestly also something similir to Google's Reverse image Search would be fairly enough. The purpose of this rant is obviously to avoid double or more uploading of the same item. Thanks for the attention. Abreham97 (talk) 17:58, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Open in new tab on MediaSearch

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but is there a way to make ctrl+click work on Special:MediaSearch again? It just acts exactly the same as just clicking, opening the preview sidebar, instead of opening the clicked link in a new tab, as you'd expect it to. Schockocraft (talk) 18:51, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Schockocraft. I noticed that too. The gadget to open results in a new tab only works now in Special:Search.

Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets

You will get a lot more help here: Commons:Village pump/Technical.

--Timeshifter (talk) 16:57, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Ah, no that's not what i'm talking about, i don't want the search result list to be displayed in a new tab, but when i am already on that list i want to open the found pages themselves in new tabs. Schockocraft (talk) 14:33, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Schockocraft. OK, I see what you mean. The search suggestions are not links as they are on Special:Search. On that search site the suggestions themselves are links. One can use ctrl-click to open a search in a new tab with that search term suggestion. Or one can right-click the search suggestion and open that specific link in a new tab. I just tested it. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:29, 16 April 2023 (UTC)