The goal of this assignment is to create a distributed Web search
engine using the Java RMI framework.
The search engine should be started with an initial URL and a depth search level. Your engine should fetch the initial URL, indexing word occurrences in that document and producing a list of URLs to fetch in the next iteration. It must keep indexing documents until the depth search level is reached.
To distribute the indexing and querying, you need to create a meta-engine. The meta-engine is started with the locations of two or more search engines (as defined above) and it is able to combine their query results into a single result. When you query the meta-engine, the meta-engine queries the search engines that it represents using RMI and combines their results into a single result. A client of the meta-engine should not be able to tell the difference between a meta-engine and a normal search engine (the interface should be the same).
Your search engine can be queried at any point, even while building the index. A query contains a single word. The engine should return the URLs for the documents that contain the word sorted by the number of occurrences of the word in each document. A search engine client will need to produce HTML or some similar method of displaying results for ease of reading.
Possible Extensions:
Submission:
The due date for this project is March 3rd, 2003, 11:55pm EST.
You should use the assignments drop-off box located at the course's WebCT
page. Upload a JAR file containing all the relevant documented
files, along with a README file containing instructions on running the
program and explaining any design decisions you made.