Seeking Professional Help

Well, for the search engine, I was completely run dry of ideas. So I decided to seek professional help from my father/client's technician

From: Roy Yiu (HIS)
Sent: 2011年11月7日 18:40
To: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Subject: RE: Question

Dear Prof. Cheung,

I am not familiar with this. As I know, to construct a searching engine, you need to use a database server(e.g. mysql, ms sql…) for its backend and you may use any computing language(s), (e.g. php, aspx….) for querying and displaying the searching result(s) to the user (i.e. the front-end).

You may imagine that:

1. some particular information of a webpage, like Page title, Domain Name, Page description, Keywords…., will be collected and stored into a database. To store what kind of information will affect the accuracy and searching rate.

2. one makes a request to search “something” from the searching engine webpage (front-end). The request will be sent to the database server for processing. The searching result will be sent to the front-end webpage for displaying.

Yes, in fact, you may copy and paste the webpage information into the database for searching! However, it works but it is not efficient. Certainly, there are some API for searching, e.g.

http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/dev_guide.html

Regards,

Roy

From: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 5:04 PM
To: Roy Yiu (HIS)
Subject: RE: Question

Dear Roy,

Do you have any idea?

With thanks,

Sui-wai

From: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Sent: 2011年11月5日 20:51
To: Roy Yiu (HIS)
Subject: FW: Question

Dear Roy,

This is a question from my daughter Laura. Could you tell her answers?

With thanks, from

Sui-wai

From: laura cheung [mailto:laura001_hk@yahoo.com]
Sent: 2011年11月5日 20:32
To: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Subject: Question

I would like to ask how one would make a search engine that would search through an entire website. I do not understand how it works. Would it be through usage of PHP and MySQL? Or would it be through Javascript? Also, how does it work? Does it copy and paste content into a database and then search through that? Or is there a function/plug in that allows searching through an entire website? Thank you in advance.

Anyway, this proved to be useless since Roy (the technician) seemed to know little about web programming and the information he gave me was more about how it worked (eg. search engine searches things) but not more in depth information on MySQL.

So I decided, next, to try seeking help from my aunt, a freelance programmer from toronto. Thankfully my client (my aunt's brother) gave me her email at my request.