Command Line Search Engine

A simple yet powerful offline search engine built in Python. It indexes a folder of plain text files and lets you search through them instantly using keyword queries. Perfect for fast document lookup, LLM notes retrieval, and offline NLP-based search experiments.

Features

• Full-text search over .txt files
• Inverted Index for fast lookup
• Contextual snippets from matching lines
• Command Line
• No internet required (fully offline)

Tech Stack

• Python 3
• os, re, collections (for indexing)

How It Works

1. The script reads all .txt files inside the docs/ folder.
2. An inverted index is built mapping each word to the documents and line numbers it appears in.
3. The user enters a search query (single word or multiple keywords).
4. It returns matching file names and lines containing the terms.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/mini-search-engine.git
   cd mini-search-engine

2. Add your .txt files into the docs/ folder.

3. To run the command-line version:

   python search.py

4. To use the Streamlit UI (optional):

   pip install streamlit
   streamlit run app.py

Example Use Case

Search for AI terms like:

> Enter your search query: transformer

Returns:

 Found in: llm_fundamentals.txt
  - Line 4: Transformer architecture revolutionized NLP.

Notes

• All files must be in plain .txt format inside the docs/ directory.
• No internet or external API required — works offline.
• Ideal for personal note search, educational summaries, and ML paper references.

Student | Cloud + Python Enthusiast
JSS Science and Technology University