[Clipart] search engine

[Nathan Eady]

Jon Campbell wrote:
> The search engine on the front page(not the one in the top area) does 
> not work.

It works after a fashion, and it works the way it was designed to work,
but it does leave something to be desired...

> it returns no results for hammer but there is a hammer in database under 
> the tools section.

As Nicu points out, currently it only searches based on the keywords
that are attached to the image.  I had already thought about extending
it to also search based on author, and Nicu's suggestion of also using
the title seems like a reasonable improvement too, but it still will
not be *magic*, in the sense of understanding what each image represents
and understanding the semantic meaning of the search terms.  The top
computer scientists in the world don't know how to make it do that.
So we will have to settle for indexing the metadata that are attached
to the image by humans.

One of the tools we intend to eventually create is a web-based
interface for users to attach additional keywords to the images and
also rate the images in terms of quality and leave specific feedback
about them.  When that is in place, we can solicit help from a larger
group of people for rating and categorizing the images.  Also, authors
would potentially be able to update their images.  However, we need
certain other pieces of infrastructure in place before we can
develop that, so it will be some months yet in coming I think.