This is a basic plaintext-based search engine. The input is a number of plaintext files stored in .txt format. The user enters plaintext queries, and is presented by an ordered list of results. There is a maximum limit of 10 results (a constant set in the code) which can easily be configured to the user's ease.

The program uses a basic tf*idf comparison model, as detailed here: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf).

The program has been tested using plain text files from Project Gutenberg.

The basic comparison function does not take into account the position of the words within the documents. A future improvement is to add that functionality, by storing the locations of where each word occurs in the documents.

IntelliJ can be used easily to create a jar for this project, by creating a new project and importing these files. Once you have the jar file, run the following:

java -jar TextSearchEngine.jar <document-directory>

To manually compile the java files into class files, run:

javac Catalog.java DocumentNameFilter.java NoDocumentsFoundException.java ResultComparator.java Document.java Main.java Result.java

Then the program can be run by placing the class files in com/abhishek, and running:

java com/abhishek/Main <document-directory>