Announcing - Advanced search for the IWC Collectors Forum

I wanted to contribute to the forum community, and spent some time to create a
pretty advanced search engine for the forum.

You can check it out here: crownwheel.co/iwc

While I know that Tonny is taking to the folks in Schaffhausen about fixing
the forum/google search (as posted here), I realized that with
all the depth of great info and knowledge here it could be useful (at least
for me) to have even more powerful options for searching and researching
things.

Features and capabilities of the new search engine:

• Search the entire forum, return all relevant results for any search terms (nearly 30K threads and 300K posts spanning 19 years)
• Click "Search" without any terms to browse through and filter all the forum post results.
• Advanced logical search operations - ability to add quotes to search for specific terms (e.g. " blue dial "), ability to specify AND/OR/NOT for terms - e.g. (Portuguese OR Big Pilot) Perpetual Calendar
• Automatic synonyms - type any version of the term to results for all variations - useful for name aliases ( Portuguese / Portugieser ), to fix common misspellings ( Ingenieur / Ingeneiur ) and to cover common abbreviations ( PPC/BP/WG etc). I can post the list of all the current synonyms I came up with and we can extend it with additional ideas you might have.
• Sort results by relevancy, discussion age (newest or oldest posts first), size of the thread (to see the most active and long discussions first)
• See who are the top forum users who discussed certain terms and filter results by specific users (for example all posts where Michael Friedberg discusses Calibre 5000 )
• Filter results by user ranks - for example, narrow down search only to posts written by Moderators and Masters
• Filter by thread size - to see only long discussions, only short discussions etc.
• Ability to search only the original thread title and the original post

V2 (Feb 2020):

• Image Search
  • Index of ~46K total valid images, restored to their full glory from Photobucket and other sources (no more blurry or watermarked images) and securely cached for future preservation and maximum performance.
  • Returns and displays only full valid images - no more broken images or image links
  • See results in Pinterest-like thumbnail river view
  • Full screen gallery view with image paging, zoom and additional metadata
  • Navigate to original forum post by clicking on the thread title in image view
  • Search, sort and filter image results using same advanced options as post search (query, by user, post age etc etc)
• Two new advanced sorting options
  • By post content size - returns longest posts first. Convenient for finding longer and potentially useful articles, reviews etc. on various topics.
  • By image count in a post - returns posts with most images first. Allows finding most visually rich posts and stories on any topic.

Check it out, hope you find it useful and would
appreciate any feedback and suggestions.

Thank you so much for creating this resource! I just searched my favorite
topic, "3700," which refers to the reference known as the Porsche Design Titan
(first of three different references). Knowledge of the history of the 3700
consumes me! The search quickly returned many pages of references to this
query, and I haven't had the opportunity yet to search beyond the third page.

There promises to be some information there that I can use, but there is one
frustration I encountered that I would suspect is beyond anyone's ability to
rectify: many of the photos and links are dead. So much of the information is
tied into these photographs that no longer exist. If my suspicion is correct,
there is nothing that can be done to retrieve these valuable photos and links,
short of the original authors providing the photos again. But if there is any
way to retrieve those old photos, that would make the research capability of
your system absolutely complete!

Even with the absence of the old photos, your work is phenomenal, and greatly
appreciated. Thank you again for providing such a resource for your fellow IWC
"fanatics!"

Fantastic

Great effort and Thank You

This is excellent - thanks for your effort and generous contribution!

Who are you ? Other than our knight in shining armour!

what a great tool... I can actually find my own posts back.

thank you - thank you

This is fabulous!! Thank you so much for your time and effort and generosity.

Great Tool !

Many thanks for the effort.

Regards

This is so nice to be able to search again- many thanks.

Nelson

Thanks a lot for all your time and effort. There is only one word for it:
Brilliant!

jk

This is just fantastic!!! Truly very much appreciated, thank you!

Thanks for all the kind words. I'll be adding a few new capabilties soon.
Images are definitely a high priority for me - a lot of great information and
history in images, and while many of them are probably lost forever, there's a
chance that many of them could be recovered. Stay tuned, and please keep the
feedback and the suggestions coming!

A gift from heaven !! finaly i can find my saved articles and all other
knowledge again. You should be rewarded a watch of choice for this !

Well done Alex. Many thanks.

With the holidays behind us, wanted to share some additional work I've been
doing on the forum search engine, specifically on the images front.

In the 19 years the forum existed, there were 73,387 photos shared by the
members. These photos are an incredible source of information and
inspiration.

Unfortunately, more than half of these images (40,010) were hosted on
Photobucket, with most currently either completely broken, blurry, obscured by
watermarks and otherwise unusable or compromised.

The good news is that I was able to develop a few tools and salvage the
majority of these images (30,492) and get them in their full original glory
and make them available to the community again.

With this and additional work around images, this means that in total instead
of only about 20% of original images being fully available on the forum, now
more than 60% of original images will be available.

After completing this first image preservation step, I've been working on new
Image Search for the forum. Stay tuned, planning to make it available very
soon.

Thank you!

This is amazing! I've just found my favorite post ever from 2013.

Thank you for the great work.

Jonathan

ALEXIRT - you are amazing!

A truly dedicated craftsman with an eye for detail.

Thank you for your thoroughness and generosity!

As mentioned above, I hope IWC rewards you for your services and contribution
to ours and their historical legacy.

Thank you, thank you, very exciting!!!