Building a Self-Contained Search Engine in the Browser

Abstract

JavaScript engines inside modern web browsers are capable of running sophisticated multi-player games, rendering impressive 3D scenes, and supporting complex, interactive visualizations. Can this processing power be harnessed for information retrieval? This paper explores the feasibility of building a JavaScript search engine that runs completely self-contained on the client side within the browser - this includes building the inverted index, gathering terms statistics for scoring, and performing query evaluation. The design takes advantage of the IndexDB API, which is implemented by the LevelDB key{value store inside Google's Chrome browser. Experiments show that although the performance of the JavaScript prototype falls far short of the open-source Lucene search engine, it is sufficiently responsive for interactive applications. This feasibility demonstration opens the door to interesting applications and architectures.