[Clipart] OCAL Search Improvement Suggestions

[Jon Phillips]

Great suggestions Rgyle...I would recommend that you jump in more to
OpenClipArtLibrary...

I'll answer below....

On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 02:47 -0800, rygle wrote:
> Can I propose some search improvements for OCAL? I think given the no
> thumbnails situation, some small changes may at least help tide things over.
> 
> 1. I've setup a search plugin for OCAL as follows - Go to 
> http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=Open+Clip+Art&mode=exact my
> plugin on SearchPlugins.net  and then click on the I on the left. This gives
> either FF2+ and IE7+ the ability to search OCAL from the built in search box
> on the top right. There are no tricks with this plugin - If in doubt, click
> on S to check out the source code. The hex is just the favicon image encoded
> to base64 to go in the XML file.

This is super great! Do you blog? It would be great if you blog
this...if you want to help us by blogging ocal related things, you can
send us your feed and we can plug it into our new system...

> 
> 2. Can I suggest a simple change to the OCAL search defaults? Why not make
> OCAL search only for clipart by default, and not for users, then clipart.
> Notice that my plugin differs from the standard OCAL search only in this
> way. It does not search for users, but only clipart. The search URL I used
> is 
> http://openclipart.org/media/search/results?search_text=TEST&search_type=any&search_in=2
> http://openclipart.org/media/search/results?search_text=TEST&search_type=any&search_in=2 
> (substitute TEST for your search terms), as opposed to the default
> "search_in=3" (users and art), while "search_in=1" only searches users. Can
> I ask that the OCAL admins change this default to just pick up clipart? Or
> can we have a switch that allows us to disable the user search? Or at the
> very worst, can someone please write a greasemonkey script to allow this?

There are some big changes coming to our search system in the next 2-3
weeks...its a matter of updating our engine with the latest code...stay
tuned.

> 
> 3. Can I also suggest that the OCAL admins make the site fully indexable by
> Google? If that were done, it would mean we could use this URL - 
> http://images.google.com.au/images?q=site%3Aopenclipart.org+TEST
> http://images.google.com.au/images?q=site%3Aopenclipart.org+TEST  and have a
> very useful graphical interface to OCAL with small effort. At present Google
> only seems to be indexing the user profiles, and nothing else, so it can
> find a small number of images, but only through user profiles. Surely there
> is some way to feed more information across?

We've had some problems with bots loading our site down soooo
heavily...although, i think I can remove the disallow on tags now on the
robots.txt so that more files can be found...thanks!

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips

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