2008/12/1 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
What would be the technical requirements of this approach and what would be its disadvantages?
It would require 1 bot and a copy of whichever wikis you wanted to work from. Just harvest all the links to commons and create those on commons as category redirects (you can also harvest all the redirects that point at the article with the link to commons and create redirecting cats for them as well)
Problems? Maintenance wise it would be tricky.
If you were instead going to build something server side you could use the articles the images are used in as keywords for your search engine but by then we are getting a little beyond my knowledge of search design.