On This Page

Search Engine Design and Implementation

Key Components of the Web Search Engine

Crawler (Web Spider)

Purpose: The crawler is responsible for discovering, fetching, and downloading web pages from the internet. It systematically traverses the web, following links from one page to another.

Main Tasks:

  • Seed URL Initialization
  • URL Scheduling and Prioritization
  • Fetching and Downloading Content
  • Content Parsing and Link Extraction
  • URL Normalization and Canonicalization
  • Politeness and Compliance (e.g., robots.txt adherence)
  • Data Storage and Management
  • Distributed Crawling for large-scale operations

Indexer

Purpose: The indexer processes the content fetched by the crawler, organizes it into a searchable index, and stores it in a way that facilitates quick retrieval.

Main Tasks:

  • Content Parsing and Tokenization
  • Stemming and Lemmatization
  • Term Weighting (e.g., TF-IDF)
  • Index Construction (Forward and Inverted Indexing)
  • Metadata Handling (e.g., document titles, URLs)
  • Index Compression and Storage
  • Index Updating and Maintenance
  • Relevance Ranking and Optimization

Query Processor

Purpose: The query processor interprets user queries, retrieves relevant documents from the index, and ranks them based on relevance.

Main Tasks:

  • Query Parsing and Normalization
  • Query Expansion (Synonyms, Stemming, Lemmatization)
  • Boolean and Proximity Operations
  • Document Scoring and Ranking
  • Result Retrieval and Snippet Generation
  • Advanced Query Processing (e.g., faceted search, NLP)
  • Personalization and Context-Aware Search

Translation Module

Purpose: The translation module translates search results into Armenian on the fly, allowing users to access content in their preferred language.

Main Tasks:

  • Language Detection (Query and Result Language)
  • Translation Model Selection (Machine Translation Engine)
  • Pre-Translation Processing (Text Extraction and Normalization)
  • Translation Execution (API Calls, Error Handling)
  • Post-Translation Processing (Quality Assurance, Reassembly)
  • Contextual and Cultural Adaptation
  • Caching and Reuse of Translations
  • Integration with Query Processor and UI

Result Storage and Serving

Purpose: This component manages the storage of indexed data and serves the search results to users.

Main Tasks:

  • Data Storage (Indexed documents, metadata)
  • Result Retrieval from the index based on query terms
  • Caching frequently accessed results to speed up response times
  • Load Balancing to distribute queries across multiple servers

User Interface (UI)

Purpose: The UI allows users to interact with the search engine, submit queries, and view results.

Main Tasks:

  • Search Box Integration
  • Real-Time Feedback (e.g., Autocomplete, Suggestions)
  • Result Display (Titles, Snippets, Translations)
  • User Controls (Filters, Sorting, Pagination)
  • Responsive Design for various devices
  • Toggle for Original Language and Armenian Translations