"Find Groups": A tool to find each word in a title

[Jörn KH]

This small application should enhance the search for titles of groups and bridge the time until the built-in search is renewed.

It is scripted
to find each single word in a title, no matter which position the word has, and
to show up to 100 results.

Example:
A search for pla, will return (with today): 179 hits:

1) the beauty of planet earth
2) Save our planet
3) Squares / Plazas / Places / Platz / Piazze / 広場 / ميدان / Náměstí
...

For now it will not find letters in the middle of a word. Searching for lac will not find place.
Capitalisation doesn't matter: "Photograph" will be find by "pho" or "Pho"
The search with e.g. Cyrillic characters is supported.

You can find it here:

http://Find-Groups.appspot.com/


Some further notices about restrictions and known issues:

http://Find-Groups.appspot.com/i_info.html


Thanks to Tomas for a short beta test.

If you encounter an error, please send a PM and let me know the search item which caused the error.

Jörn


Edit 2012-05-04
Update is working again, see info in this posting:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/panoramio-groups-beta/MpLQEcKHW60/OhsfKHs_OSUJ


Edit 2012-02-16
I am sorry for inconvenience but unfortunately Google has changed their Quotas of "App Engine" with 2011-11-07, so it is not possible to update the database anymore, without reaching the limits of the free usage of App Engine in a very short time.

After reaching the limits, the application will stopped by Google for a maximal period of 24h - so I've disabled the update cronjobs since then.

[Jörn KH]

Statistic

2011-10-25

16773 Groups in total

08458 Groups with more than one member

08260 Groups with one member

00055 Groups with no member

[Bartolomeo Gorgoglione]

Dear Jörn,
I'm the creator of the group : Squares / Plazas / Places / Platz / Piazze / 広場 / ميدان / Náměstí , above mentioned as example.
Obviously I've used that format to allow people speaking different languages to find the group, but for estetic reasons I don't want add more translation in the name of my group.

So, I was wandering if there is also a tool I can use to "tag" the group, for example to allow a portuguese guy looking for "Praça", that is not in the title of my group, to find my group.
In another worlds, if is possible to "hide" some key worlds in the name of the group.

My idea is to just call my group "Squares" and hide, being still available, all other translations.

I think also lots of other people are having the same idea/problem as there are many groups named with the same format.

your answer will be appreciate!
Regards
Bart

[RoarX]

@Bartolomeo
What you are asking for here seem to be a search word system for groups, where the group owner can define search words for the search engine to find. It's a good idea which might help people find relevant groups easier. Of course, some will abuse such a system by adding tonnes of irrelevant search word to boost the group's hit rate. Did you think of something like this?

[Bartolomeo Gorgoglione]

dear RoarX,
to avoid the abuse, it could be enough to set a limit on the number of the single key words that could be used. I suppose 15 or 20 will be a good number.
What do you think?

[Jörn KH]

Hello Bart!
Interesting idea, but hard to realise, because one must fill the hidden part with all translated variants.

Lets view it from another perspective:
The input field takes a word in the users language, a translation process translates it to a "normalised" language (say English as the lingua franca of the Internet) and search the translated word in the "normal" title.
The title could remain as before (except for the addition of an English key word if there isn't any yet), no human has to retrieve (and type in) the translations.

I just checked the Google Translation API: Unfortunately the usage isn't free of charge anymore, and so I could not make a test and this would be better placed at Panoramio.

Tagging: As I draft the database design I included some entities for that. But I delete them after realising the amount of effort to fill them with senseful terms.

[Jörn KH]

As said above, Google has changed their Quotas, so it was not possible to update the database anymore without re-writing parts of the code.

I've revised the code lately and the update is now working without exceeding the Quota limits.

The huge backlog has been cleared and the database is up to date again.

The update process for the existing database entries - before GroupId 36282 - ( owner, number of photos and members or the existence of the group ) is currently running.