Brandon,

Would it be a lot of work to give primary weight in the Commons search listing order to files included in 

1. Categories (top level only) and 
2. Galleries 

whose name matches the search term (or is the plural thereof)?

So the top files listed for cucumber, say, would be all the files shown in http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cucumber and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cucumbers ?

Andreas


On 10/13/11 5:47 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
> Unfortunately we currently have zero developers working on search (as
> far as I know). There are several more significant search bugs that are
> also not going to be fixed any time soon. Another issue is that our
> search engine is Java while the rest of MediaWiki is PHP. This makes
> sense for performance reasons, but makes the pool of potential
> developers who are able and willing to work on it much smaller. In other
> words, this might get fixed in a few years, but I wouldn't hold my
> breathe. In the meantime, it would be good to follow Sarah's lead and
> proactively curate the content we have so that there is less potential
> for astonishment in our search results.


	Yeah; this is really a curation issue and not a search engine issue.

	Sadly, I'm one of the few people at the Foundation who knows Java or 
could even work on this, but I expect that there would be much wailing 
and gnashing of teeth were I to spend much time on this.

-- 
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate