WebSearchEngine

A minimal HTTP search engine server written in C++11. It indexes web pages using an in-memory inverted index, exposes a plain HTTP interface on port 8080, and returns matching page URLs for any single-term query submitted via a browser or HTTP client.

---

Features

• Inverted index. Tokenises page content by whitespace and maps each term to the set of pages that contain it, enabling fast constant-time lookups.
• HTTP server. Listens on a raw TCP socket and handles GET requests without any external web framework.
• Search interface. Serves a minimal HTML form at / and returns query results at /search?query=<term>.
• Lightweight by design. No runtime dependencies beyond the C++ standard library and POSIX sockets.

---

Architecture

         +------------------+
         |     Browser /    |
         |    HTTP Client   |
         +--------+---------+
                  |  TCP (port 8080)
                  v
         +------------------+
         |   startServer()  |  accept() loop
         +--------+---------+
                  |
                  v
         +------------------+
         | handleRequest()  |  parses raw GET request
         +--------+---------+
                  |
                  v
         +------------------+
         |  SearchEngine    |  tokenise + query
         +--------+---------+
                  |
                  v
         +------------------+
         | InvertedIndex    |  unordered_map<token, set<pageId>>
         +------------------+

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Repository Structure

WebSearchEngine/
├── CMakeLists.txt
├── README.md
└── main.cpp

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Getting Started

Clone the repository and enter the project directory:

git clone https://github.com/kanyutu707/WebSearchEngine.git
cd WebSearchEngine

---

Dependencies

The project relies only on the C++ standard library and POSIX networking headers (<netinet/in.h>, <unistd.h>). No third-party libraries are required.

You will need a C++11-compatible compiler and CMake 3.10 or later.

Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake

macOS

The required toolchain ships with Xcode Command Line Tools:

xcode-select --install
brew install cmake

---

Building

1. Configure

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

2. Compile

cmake --build build

This produces a binary named WebSearchEngine in the build/ directory.

---

Usage

Start the server:

./build/WebSearchEngine

The server binds to all interfaces on port 8080 and prints a confirmation:

Server is running on port 8080...

Search via browser

Open a browser and navigate to:

http://localhost:8080

Use the form to enter a search term and press Search.

Search via curl

curl "http://localhost:8080/search?query=algorithms"

Example response

Found: https://example.com<br>Found: https://example2.com<br>

To stop the server, press Ctrl+C in your terminal.

---

Adding Pages

Pages are indexed at startup inside main(). To add your own pages, call engine.addPage() before startServer():

engine.addPage(WebPage("https://yoursite.com", "your page content here"));

Each page is tokenised by whitespace. Search queries are matched against individual tokens, so multi-word queries are not supported in the current version.

---

Limitations

• Single-term queries only. Multi-word queries are not intersected across tokens.
• No URL decoding. Query strings containing %20 or + for spaces will not match correctly.
• The HTTP parser is minimal and does not handle headers, keep-alive, or malformed requests robustly.
• Pages are held entirely in memory; the index does not persist between restarts.
• The server is single-threaded: each request blocks the accept loop until it completes.