Introduction to the (Unnamed) Full Text Searching and Indexing Tool

Blog post by general_maximus on Sun, 2009-05-17 13:29
,

Hi, I’m Ankur Sethi. I’m a first year Information Technology student at Indraprastha University, New Delhi. I will be working on a full text indexing and search application for Haiku Code Drive 2009.

I use Mac OS X as my primary OS. Before I switched to the Mac, I had been an Ubuntu user for four solid years. I first read about Haiku on OSNews back in 2007 (my profile says my account is 1 year 36 weeks old), and I was hooked. What first caught my attention was the incredibly short boot time, and the low resource usage. When I read up more about what Haiku is like under the hood, this is what I thought: WANT (excuse the meme). I’m waiting for the day I can just pop a Haiku install disk into my PC and use Haiku as my primary OS.

About The Project

The objective is to build an application that can be brought up with a simple keystroke and used to navigate to important documents and applications quickly, thus reducing mouse usage.

Here are my project goals, exactly as I listed them in my GSoC application:

  • Implement a full-text indexing tool which uses a database for indexing files containing textual content, and filesystem attributes for non-text files (MP3s, images, etc.).
  • Create a plugin-based architecture that allows the indexer to index different kinds of textual content (i.e., PDFs, ODFs etc.).
  • Implement a userland process to keep the index in sync as the files change on disk.
  • Create a mechanism to query the index and implement an algorithm to sort search results by relevance.
  • Create a GUI front end for querying the index.

I will keep the Haiku world updated on what I’m doing through this blog. Looking forward to a fun summer :)

EDIT: Changed title. Names, anyone?


general_maximus's blog