TE search is inadequate

[gul791]

It is sad to say that TE search is inadequate. It is impossible to limit your search to some particular city or even some country. I think search mechanisms of TE need to be improve.

As TE is growing. City indexes are populating day by day. Now many cities has hundreds and thousands of pictures. There should be some option to further categorize the cities by monuments in city?

Best regards,
Atif

[berseph]

I was thinking that to myself the other day too...sometimes when you search for something like the eiffel tower, you only get four images in the first page from France. How odd. I was curious how the search actually worked too. How are they ordered? I'm really interested to know.

[AdrianW]

If I can't find something using the TE search, I use Google - remember that you can search a specific site by adding the following to your Google search, so if I want to search all of TE I'd add:
+site:trekearth.com

If you just want to search the Gallery, I'd add:
+site:http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/

Which means you can search a specific country if you include the path to it, so to search London, England:
+site:http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/London/

Or for members, I'd add:
+site:http://www.trekearth.com/members/

Sure it's an extra step, but it can still be a lot quicker at times ;)

[TheG1]

This is working but you can only view the the results after you click a link. A thumbnail display would be right!
I posted a request for such a search feature a year ago with nothing yet!

Think about searching for a date, city, country, favorite, keywords.... I guess TE is not updated with the current threads outside.

[AdrianW]

Hmm, that's odd. Google image search isn't pulling many TE images other than the maps. The only images showing are images that are linked by other sites.

I'm sure that used to work though... I wonder whether it's because the images are no longer stored on the main www.trekearth.com server?

Actually it's not working on any of the search engines I've just tried - google/altavista/live/yahoo.

[Emiel_Skyfreak]

Maybe update cities so, that different districts can be added.
But this will also rise a new problem...not everyone will know what district his/her photo should be belong too. And will just place it somewhere. Something that now allready happens with cities or provinces/states/counties/country districts.

For example, I want to add, in the future, photo's from the place where I live.
Which is Amsterdam. There really are a lot!!!! of photo's from Amsterdam allready.
The place where I live is a suburb, called Amsterdam Zuidoost (just Southeast in English) but it's quite seperated from the other parts of Amsterdam. It's quite a special part in that way..
I think, if I would be adding photo's off my direct surroundings, I will create a new 'city' called Amsterdam Zuidoost. But would feel guilty too, by creating another 'city' name.

But I agree on the search, it's not very specific in it's results.
Can use Google..but indeed involves extra time/operations.

Well, I'll just see and wait..and try to work around problems that arise.

[gul791]

I am not saying to add more cities to add confusion or divide the cities by District.

My point is to there should be some option to subcategories the cities by monuments/Landmarks, e.g.

Earth >> Europe >> France >> North >> Ile-de-France >> Paris >> Eiffel Tower

or

Earth >> Asia >> Pakistan >> East >> Punjab >> Lahore >> Badhshai Mosque

[AdrianW]

Right Google seems to be indexing images here again now, so go to Google Image Search: and drop the following search terms in:
+site:trekearth.com +eiffel
which gets us:
Eiff el Photos on TE

or
+site:trekearth.com +badshahi
which gets us:
Bads hahi Photos on TE

[ktanska]

Thanks for the tip. I have also wished something like this for a long time.
Kari

[gul791]

Thanks Warren for the tips,

But is not it useful to sub-categorize the monuments just like we do for countries, provenience and cities.

Best regards,
Atif