This project will be offered in winter term 2026/27. It can be placed both in Bachelor’s and Master’s program. More information will be provided soon.
Content
In this project, a Web Search Engine is to be developed. The core tasks are roughly the following:
- Implement an HTML Parser.
- Design and Implement a Web Crawler.
- Design the required database schema to store the contents of visited pages and the link structure.
- Write an SQL-based query processor to execute Google-style keyword queries.
- Devise/Create index structures to accelerate the querying performance.
- Implement alternate query processors using threshold algorithms.
- Realize alternate methods to compute the score of how well a document matches the query.
- For this, implement Google’s Pagerank algorithm and integrate it in the scoring model.
- Implement an HTML-based user interface and a Web service
- Use the Web services of your fellow student to realize a meta search engine.
Prerequisites
- Participants should have successfully attended the core lecture Datenbanksysteme (database systems).
- The lecture Information Retrieval and Data Mining is not a prerequisite but recommended to understand the deeper theory behind most of the aspects behind this project.
- Having attended the beginner’s course Informationssysteme (information systems), or equivalent, is assumed anyway.
Registration
The registration process will be managed in a centralized manner for all of the CS department’s projects, via OLAT courses. The assignment will of course reflect your specialization, prerequisite lectures (see above), and project wishes. You can find the password for the OLAT courses in the email the department will send or sent to you.
Once you get assigned to this project, we will contact you with additional information by email.
Literature
We will introduce the main concepts of the required techniques/tools when handing out the individual exercise sheets. In addition, the following are standard books for databases and information retrieval you might want to consult. We will also give specific pointers to Web sources during the semester.
- Introduction to Information Retrieval, by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan Hinrich Schütze, 2008.
- Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines,by Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, Gordon V. Cormack.
- Datenbanksysteme: Eine Einführung (German), by Alfons Kemper and André Eickler.
- Database Management Systems, by Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke.
