Simple-Search-Engine

About the project

A simple fast search engine written in java with the help of the Collection API which takes in multiple queries and outputs results accordingly.

How it works

This search engine implements inverted index by mapping each words to their respective locations in the database. Upon running the program a user menu will prompt asking the user "1. Find a person", "2. Print all people" and "0. Exit". The first option helps users find a person (or any specific object based on the type of database being used) based on 3 search stratigies "ALL", "ANY" and "NONE" respectively. The second option prints all the content of the database. Lastly the third option, you guessed it, exits the program.

Search stratigies

As mentioned before there are three search stratigies "ALL", "ANY" and "NONE". "ALL" takes certain words as input and searches the database for a line which contains all the contents from the input, for instance: if the input is "ERICK HARRINGTON" then it will search for content which contains both "ERICK" && "HARRINGTON" (case insensitive). "ANY" searched for a line which contains any of the contents from the input, for instance: if the input is "Erick Harrington" then it will serach for content which contains either "Erick" || "Harrington". "NONE" makes sure it returns all the contents of the database excluding the contents of the input.

Note

The program takes command line argument for the location of the file/database used (at index 1 -> args[1]), if required the program can be modified to take files directly from the main class by uncommenting the line of code directly below the line "Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File(args[1]))" and mentioning the file path. Use java version 13 or greater as the enchanced switch statement used demands it.