SEE

SEE (or see, whatever) is a simple search engine written in Erlang. So far it can crawl through web indexing new pages into ets table. It's split into two applications:

• see_db handles indexing and the interface. There could be only one node running this application.
• see_crawler is responsible for crawling the web. There may be many nodes runnign this application.

Starting see_db node

This will start see_db node with -sname db:

cd db
./start_db_node

Starting see_crawler node

This will create see_crawler node with crawlers geting URLs from the see_db node called db:

cd crawler
./start_crawler_node

Default number of crawlers is 1, but it can be changed by crawler_num parameter for see_crawler application.

Usage

By default the web interface is available at http://localhost:8888 on db node. You need to add first URL to begin crawling with.

Each crawler requests an unvisited URL from db node and visits it, extracting words (as they are) and links from the page, and sends them back to db node. Words after normalization are saved into the index and links are inserted as unvisited URLs.

TODO

Things not yet implemented:

• stemming
• ranking
• distributed index storage
• persistent index storage
• periodically updating already visited pages