Architecture overview

The architecture of a common Web search engine contains a front-end process and a back-end process, as shown in Figure 1. In the front-end process, the user enters the search words into the search engine interface, which is usually a Web page with an input box. The application then parses the search request into a form that the search engine can understand, and then the search engine executes the search operation on the index files. After ranking, the search engine interface returns the search results to the user. In the back-end process, a spider or robot fetches the Web pages from the Internet, and then the indexing subsystem parses the Web pages and stores them into the index files. If you want to use Lucene to build a Web search application, the final architecture will be similar to that shown in Figure 1.