Volume 11, Number 3

Developing Smart Web-Search using Regex

  Authors

Ikechukwu Onyenwe¹, Stanley Ogbonna¹, Ebele Onyedimma¹, Onyedikachukwu Ikechukwu-Onyenwe¹ and Chidinma Nwafor², ¹Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka, Nigeria, ²Nigerian Army College of Environmental Science and Technology, Nigeria

  Abstract

Due to the increasing storage data on the Web Applications it becomes very difficult to use only keywordbased searches to provide comprehensive search results, thus increasing the difficulty for web users to search information on the web. In this paper, we proposed using a combined method of keyword-based and Regular expressions (RegEx) searches to perform search using strings of targeted items for optimal results even as the volume of data around the world on the Internet continues to explode. The idea is to embed RegEx patterns as part of search engine’s algorithm in a web application project to provide strings related to the targeted items for more comprehensive coverage of search results. The user's search query is a string of characters guided by search boundaries selected from the entry point. The results returned from the search operation are different results within a category determined by the search boundaries. This is designed to be beneficial to a user who has an obscure idea about the information he/she wanted to search but knows the boundries within which to get the information. This technique can be applied to data processing tasks such as information extraction and search refinements.

  Keywords

Web, RegEx, User Input, Information Extraction.