Project Description #
Tiny Search Engine is a fully functional search engine implemented in C as a course project for ENGS 50 (Software Design and Implementation) at Dartmouth College. Built as a solo project, the system is composed of three core components that work together to replicate the fundamental pipeline of a modern search engine. The Crawler systematically traverses webpages starting from a seed URL, downloading and saving page content while respecting a configurable depth limit. The Indexer processes the crawled pages to build an inverted index data structure, mapping each word to the documents in which it appears along with its term frequency. Finally, the Querier accepts user search queries, supports both “and” and “or” Boolean operators, scores matching documents based on term frequency, and returns ranked search results to the user. The project reinforced core skills in C programming, memory management, data structures (including hash tables and counters), file I/O, and modular software design. Code is available upon request.