1. IST 441 Example Projects

2. Undergrad Project Find a customer – interest in xbox game forum Build a search engine for Xbox game forums etc. Compare two approaches: Google CSE and LucidWorks. Steps: Crawl websites (at most 5). Determine crawl depth, how to include/exclude certain pages, filetypes. Extract information and build the index. Experiment with different rankings (see “relevancy workbench” app in your LucidWorks installation). http://ist441.ist.psu.edu:8988/relevancy/experiment Perform search and compare the precision@K values.

3. Graduate Project Crawling academic institution webpages in Qatar (it’s a small domain). Integrating a more powerful crawler such as Nutch/heritrix with LucidWorks system. Focused crawling i.e. crawling for specific type of pages such as researchers’ home pages. Modifying the parser to extract specific information such as email address, phone numbers in a web page. Modifying Solr schema and/or ranking functions. Comparing search results with Google CSE. Discuss with instructor for more information.