User:Tangotango/Mayflower

Mayflower is a gallery-based full-text search engine for the media on Wikimedia Commons. It is available on the toolserver, at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (for details, please see this page.)

Your comments and suggestions are welcome! Please post feedback on the talk page.

Search tips

• Use as few words as possible. One or two words yields the fastest results.
• Mayflower automatically "stems" every word you search for. Therefore, "towers" is the same as "towering", etc.

Caveats

• Media that are in the Mayflower index but have already been deleted from Commons do not appear, but are counted in the number of results.
• The index is updated on a manual basis, as database dumps become available. New images may take a few weeks to appear.

Changelog

• July 22 - New "popups" description panel for Javascript-enabled browsers. Can now search for specific file types (SVG files only, etc.) Searching for media in/not in specific categories, which was buggy and slow, is now fixed. Search options are now saved in cookies for later use.
• May 22 - Mayflower is now internationalized and can be localized into any language. - Tangotango 11:45, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
• February 27 - Searching for words with accented characters now works. - Tangotango 15:57, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
• February 24 - New Uploaded between option in Advanced search now allows users to search for media by date uploaded. The Advanced search link on the main search results page now propagates options properly, allowing editing of searches using the user-friendly Advanced search page. - Tangotango 12:32, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• February 23 - New Display details dropdown menu in Advanced search allows users to display license icons and/or categories next to or below the image thumbnails. Search form has now been moved to top-right corner of the page, as was suggested, freeing up vertical space on the results page. - Tangotango 07:45, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
• February 20 - Advanced Search is now available. Searches can now be restricted by file type and file size. A hopefully easier-to-understand category inclusion/exclusion field is also provided, as well as a select box to change the number of results that are shown on one page. Further "advanced" options are planned. (Beneath the surface: considerably reduced the tool's resource usage. Many, many thanks to Gmaxwell for his invaluable help :) )

What's in store for the future

• Integration of all the various search parameters into a single table, to improve speed and flexibility of searches.
• (long-term goal) Extensionization of the tool, so that it can take advantage of the reliability of the Wikimedia servers and the search index that already exists for every wiki.

See also

• User:Duesentrieb/MediaSearch - Searches for media inside a category of your choice, with various parameters such as image size and license