Infrastructure/Search

Points of Contact

Project Sponsor

Name: Mike McGrath
Fedora Account Name: mmcgrath
Group: Infrastructure
Infrastructure Sponsor: mmcgrath

Secondary Contact info

Name: Allen Kistler
Fedora Account Name: akistler
Group: Infrastructure

Name: Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
Fedora Account Name: huzaifas
Group: Infrastructure

Project Info

Project Name: Search Engine Enhancement
Target Audience: All users of Fedora web sites
Expiration/Delivery Date (required): F13

Description/Summary

Fedora needs a search engine

Requirements

• Crawl the web sites (wiki and non-wiki)
• Search the web sites (wiki and non-wiki)
• Java, if any, must be the GCJ/OpenJDK versions in RHEL5; Sun/IBM/BEA Java is not acceptable

Preferences

• Python-based
• Programmable keywords to have control over what pages get displayed for certain keywords
• XML or library interface so other applications can use it

Project Plan

1. Investigate and evaluate existing open source search engines
2. Select candidate software
3. Create public test instances of candidate software
4. Test for functionality, performance, and impact (re-evaluate, if necessary)
5. Create capacity and deployment plans
6. Deploy

Resources Needed

• Public Test for testing candidate software
• Permanent home(s) for deployment
  • Web server(s)
  • Database server(s) (maybe)

Software Investigation and Evaluation

Comparison by Requirements

Engine Name	Source Language	Integrated Crawler	Integrated Search Tool	Programmable Categories	Application Interface
CLucene	C++
DataparkSearch	C
Egothor	Java
Ferret	Ruby
Indri	C/C++
Isearch	C++
KinoSearch	Perl/C	No (sample file crawler included)	No (sample included)	Yes	Yes (BDB/JSON)
Namazu	Perl
Nutch	Java	Yes (OpenJDK command line)	Yes (Tomcat servlet)	No	Yes (Java)
Swish-e	C/Perl	Yes (Perl)	Sort Of (sample included, but has problems)	No (but can search on META tags)	Yes (Perl and C APIs)
Terrier	Java
Xapian	C++	Sort Of (combined Omega with custom Perl)	Yes (rudimentary Omega CGI)	Yes	Yes (C++, Perl, Python, Ruby)
Zettair	C
Engine Name	Source Language	Integrated Crawler	Integrated Search Tool	Programmable Categories	Application Interface

In Progress

• CLucene

C++ port of Lucene

in Fedora already

described as beta by the developers

• DataparkSearch

written in C

• Egothor - Allen investigating

written in Java

• Ferret

Ruby port of Lucene

KinoSearch and Ferret intend to merge as Lucy

• Indri

written in C/C++

• Isearch

written in C++

• KinoSearch - akistler examined

• Description

Perl/C port of Lucene

in Fedora already

maintainer Rectangular Research appears to be just one guy, who considers KinoSearch to be alpha software

KinoSearch and Ferret intend to merge as Lucy

• Evaluation

Search engine library with sample indexer and search page rather than fully-functional application. Stores indices in Berkeley DB files with JSON interfaces. Allows custom-designed indices, including categories (exact match) to fulfill "programmable keywords" requirement. Each document index on each document source is a single write-once file collection (BDB and JSON) in a unique directory. Rerunning the indexer creates a new directory, obsoleting the old directory if all the old documents are included. The old directory then needs to be cleaned up. Postings can, however, be deleted from an index. Additionally, only the new documents can be indexed, but that's not efficient.

• Requirements

buildrequires

• gcc
• (EPEL) perl-Module-Build

requires

• (EPEL) perl-JSON-XS

Problem: Desires 1.53, but EPEL has 1.43

Note: http://web.archive.org/web/20071122035408/search.cpan.org/src/MLEHMANN/JSON-XS-1.53/

Note: works with 1.43, anyway

• (EPEL) perl-Lingua-Stem-Snowball
• (EPEL) perl-Lingua-StopWords
• (EPEL) perl-Parse-RecDescent

sample indexer reads files from the file system and requires

• (EPEL) perl-HTML-Tree

sample cgi search script requires

• (CPAN) Data::Pageset (which requires Data::Page)
• (EPEL) perl-Test-Exception
• (EPEL) perl-Class-Accessor-Chained

• Namazu - Huzaifa investigating

written in Perl

in Fedora already

• Nutch - akistler examined

• Description

written in Java

based on Lucene

the crawler/indexer is a Java command line application; the default depth is 5; the default number of threads is 10

the search tool runs in a Java servelet container, e.g., Tomcat

• Evaluation

There's nothing to build. Simply configure the crawler (which is actually the indexer, too) and deploy/configure the searcher. The crawler caches the pages it indexes, making the cache available to the search tool. The search interface is extremely simple and is multi-lingual, but is almost entirely an advertisement for the Nutch project. It doesn't look particularly easy to rebrand. Overall, the polish of the finished product means it's less flexible to custom modifications, like programmable keywords. After creating a new index (i.e., after a new crawl), the search application must be reloaded in Tomcat manager. The crawler is more flexible than a brief investigation could reveal. The official documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Searches are for single terms only, no multiple terms or +/- Booleans.

• Requirements

java-1.6.0-openjdk, java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel (explicit specification short-circuits yum's attempt to install BEA for Tomcat)

tomcat5, tomcat5-webapps, tomcat5-admin-webapps (tomcat5-admin-webapps is probably not actually required, but is very handy)

• Set-up Notes

The best "tutorial" is http://wiki.apache.org/nutch/NutchTutorial

Create /etc/profile.d/java.sh for "export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk" (required for the crawler)

In /opt (in this example, though anyplace will do) "tar xzf /path/to/tar/file/nutch-1.0.tar.gz"

Set http.agent.name in /opt/nutch-1.0/conf/nutch-site.xml (e.g., FedoraProject)

Create a flat file of starting URLs in /opt/nutch-1.0/urls/root-urls.txt (it can be any file name in the directory)

Edit /opt/nutch-1.0/conf/crawl-urlfilter.txt to set regular expressions which keep or discard links for processing (e.g., the domain of the servers crawled)

Run the crawler, putting the database in /opt/nutch-1.0/crawl

Deploy the WAR file from /opt/nutch-1.0/nutch-1.0.war as /nutch in Tomcat manager

Set searcher.dir in /var/lib/tomcat5/webapps/nutch/WEB-INF/classes/nutch-site.xml to /opt/nutch-1.0/crawl

• Swish-e - akistler examined

• Description

written in C

Note: Swish++ is a rewrite in C++ (not evaluated here)

• Evaluation

Search engine with a built-in web crawler, a built-in file system crawler, and an interface for an external crawler. The distribution includes sample search pages which use the Perl API. There is also a C API. The index is not customizable, but does include a facility for including metawords (exact match) and the path in the index for each document. The documentation acknowledges that the software only supports ASCII, but some MBCS may also work.

• Requirements

buildrequires

• gcc
• make
• libxml2-devel
• zlib-devel

requires

• libxml2
• zlib
• perl-libwww-perl (for the built-in spider)
• others as desired to index documents (pdf, etc.)

• Terrier (TERabyte RetrIEveR)

written in Java

• Xapian - akistler examined

• Description

written in C++

bindings to Python, Ruby, and Perl XS

xapian-core, xapian-bindings, and perl-Search-Xapian in Fedora already; xapian-omega is not

additional bindings to PHP, Java, and more (?)

Omega provides a Xapian front-end for indexing (via script) and searching (command line or CGI)

Omega provides glue scripts for ht://Dig, mbox files, and perl DBI

Flax is another search engine built on top of Xapian and CherryPy

• Evaluation

Xapian is a search engine library. Omega adds functionality on top of Xapian. The Xapian database is very flexible, supporting an entirely user-designed schema. Usage through Omega loses very little, if any, of that flexibility, however the supplied Omega CGI is extremely rudimentary. The supplied Omega CGI also requires the database to be named "default," although that can be changed. Database columns are of type field or index. Fields are stored verbatim (e.g., URL, date, MIME type, keywords). Indices are input as blocks of text or other content to be indexed, but not stored (e.g., the corpus of a file or web page). The Omega scriptindex utility can be combined with an external web crawler for HTML. Making Omega work with Apache requires relabeling /var/lib/omega as httpd_sys_content, or moving /var/lib/omega to /var/www/omega and using the default context there. In this evaluation, /var/lib/omega was moved to /var/www/omega. Xapian only works with UTF-8.

• Requirements

xapian-core buildrequires

• gcc gcc-c++
• make
• zlib-devel

xapian-bindings buildrequires (not including gcc gcc-c++ make)

• python python-devel
• ruby ruby-devel
• xapian-core-devel

perl-Search-Xapian buildrequires (not including gcc gcc-c++ make)

• perl
• xapian-core-devel

xapian-omega buildrequires (not including gcc gcc-c++ make)

• libtool
• xapian-core-devel

xapian-core requires

• xapian-core-libs

xapian-bindings requires

• coreutils
• python
• xapian-core-libs

perl-Search-Xapian requries

• perl
• xapian-core-libs

xapian-omega requires

• httpd
• perl
• perl-DBI
• xapian-core-libs

• Set-up Notes

Using custom crawler that requires perl-libwww-perl

Updated Omega rpm .spec to move /var/lib/omega to /var/www/omega, including updating /etc/omega.conf

Use default database at /var/www/omega/data/default

/var/www/omega/data/default.index is

URI : field boolean=Q unique=Q

ContentType : field=MIMEtype index=T

LastModified : field=Date date=unix

Title : field index=S

Content : index

To index, run (as someone who can write to /var/www/omega/data/default)

./crawl.pl http://fedoraproject.org | scriptindex /var/www/omega/data/default /var/www/omega/data/default.index

Note that "Content : unhtml index" would be preferable in the index, but unhtml apparently has bugs

• Public Test notes

Public Test server is publictest3

At this time, only installed xapian-core-libs, xapian-core, and xapian-omega

Omega bombs on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview (and would possibly on others later) with "unhtml index"

Resolution: Don't use "unhtml"

Omega bombs on long URIs (longer than 245 chars)

Action: Need to enhance custom crawler to filter URIs better (/w/index.php from the wiki, in this case)

• Zettair

written in C

Eliminated from Consideration

• Lucene - akistler examined

• Reason for elimination

It has no crawling/spidering facility. It has no user query interface. There are no samples.

• Description

written in Java, but ported to others

Requires/uses GCJ

in Fedora already

PyLucene is a Python wrapper around Java Lucene

• Evaluation

Search engine library meant to be integrated into applications

• Requirements

buildrequires (based on 1.4.3-f7)

• ant
• ant-junit
• java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-devel
• javacc
• jpackage-utils
• junit
• make

requires (based on 1.4.3-f7)

• java-1.4.2-gcj-compat

• mnoGoSearch - akistler examined

• Reason for elimination

Uses an external database. Tested against SQLite. Didn't work.

• Description

written in C

UNIX/Linux source code is GPL; Windows binaries are commercial, likely based on the GPL UNIX/Linux code, and lag a few versions behind

Indices are stored in a database; Supported databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite (among others)

HTTP, FTP, and NNTP crawling

C, PHP, and Perl APIs

SBCS and most MBCS supported, including most eastern Asian languages

• Evaluation

The supplied install.pl script generates a configure command, but does not support SQLite. Adding --with-sqlite3 to the generated command adds SQLite support. An empty database must be created manually. A URI in the indexer.conf file specifies the location of the database. According to the documentation, sqlite:/path/to/db/file should work, but doesn't. According to the message boards on mnoGoSearch.org, sqlite://localhost/path/to/db/file should work, but doesn't. No other databases were tested for evaluation.

• Requirements

buildrequires

• gcc make
• sqlite-devel (for SQLite support)
• zlib-devel

requires

• sqlite (for SQLite support)
• zlib

• Solr - akistler examined

• Reason for elimination

It has no crawling/spidering facility. It has no user query interface. There are no samples.

• Description

written in Java

based on Lucene

• Evaluation

The documentation describes installing Sun Java to run Solr, but OpenJDK 1.5 or later is fine. Solr needs a Java servlet container in which to run. It comes with Jetty, but other containers should work, as well (e.g., Tomcat). Currently only supports UTF-8 characters.

Basically Solr provides an HTTP admin GUI for a search engine that uses a superset of the Lucene query syntax. The schema is very flexible. Set-up is essentially entirely through XML files. Applications can query the servlet port and get XML or JSON responses.

• Requirements

buildrequires

• ant (note that ant currently pulls in java-gcj-compat, too, but it appears not to be a problem)
• ant-junit
• java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel
• junit

requires

• java-1.6.0-openjdk

• YaCy - huzaifa examined

• Reason for elimination

Requires Sun Java

• written in Java
• well maintained
• support for peer search engine database exchanges
• customized search parameters
• fast indexing and web interface for querying the back-end db

Never Considered

• Gonzui

• written in Ruby
• specializes in source code search
• not actively maintained

• Grub

• written in C#

• Heritrix

• written in Java
• archives content rather than indexing it

• ht://Dig

• written in C++
• not actively maintained

• HtdigSearch

• It's just a MediaWiki plugin, not suitable for searching non-wiki sites

• MWSearch

• Requires EzMwLucene (Java) to be running on the servers to be searched
• EzMwLucene is wiki-only, therefore MWSearch is wiki-only

• OpenFTS

• written in Perl or TCL on top of PostgreSQL
• Python interface available
• not actively maintained

• Plucene

• Perl port of Lucene
• not actively maintained

• RigorousSearch

• Crawls the MediaWiki database, not the web site
• Doesn't work for non-MediaWiki web sites, including any non-wiki web site

• Sphinx

• written in C++
• designed to index SQL tables, not web pages

• SphinxSearch

• Written in C++
• MediaWiki plug-in, so it's wiki-only

• Whoosh

• written in Python
• inspired by Lucene, but closer to a Python port of parts of KinoSearch combined with some features of Terrier
• toolkit only, not even sample crawlers and user interfaces

Public Testing

<tbd>

Deployment Plan

<tbd>