CS297 Proposal
Smart Search: A Firefox Add-On to Compute a Web Traffic Ranking
Vijaya Pamidi (vijaya_pamidi@yahoo.com)
Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett
Description:
Search engines results are given to the user based on the ranking and indexing strategies followed by the search algorithm of a search engine. Currently, there are some tools available like www.alexa.com, www.ranking.com, www.compete.com which give analytic data for ranking web sites based on web traffic, the number of users who visit a site. Alexa provides the traffic rank for a website based on two factors: The number of users that view a website and the number of pages viewed. The main goal of our project is to create a Smart Search Firefox add-on for the Yioop search engine, an open source search engine developed by my project advisor, Dr. Chris Pollett. This add-on will provide similar analytic data to the Yioop search engine. Smart search considers three main factors to get a rank for a website, these factors are:
- Number of users that view a website.
- Probability that user leaves some other website and enters the current one and the probability that user clicks on the link provided on the current page.
- Getting the user review for a result: if the user finds a particular result useful clicks on the + sign. A + will increment the rank of a page or website
Smart search takes these three basic factors into consideration and sends back data to the Yioop search engine periodically. With the results received from the Smart Search tool, the Yioop search engine refines the search results. Eventually, users would benefit from these better search results.
Schedule:
| Week 1:Aug.24 - Aug 27 | Presentation: On the related articles of Traffic Rank mentioned in article references |
| Week 2: Aug 30- Sep 03 | Study and report on Deliverable 1 Algorithms |
| Week 3:
Sep 06- Sep 10 | Study and understand Dr.Pollett's Yioop.com open source search engine code |
| Week 4:
Sep 13- Sep 17 | Deliverable 01: Due on the study report |
| Week 5:
Sep 20- Sep 24 | Study on how to make Firefox extension |
| Week 6:
Sep 27- Oct 01 | Deliverable 02 Due. Implement a simple Firefox extension |
| Week 7:
Oct 04- Oct 08 | work on more extension features |
| Week 8:
Oct 11- Oct 15 | Due Deliverable 03.Study of the Algorithms necessary for Deliverable 04 |
| Week 9:
Oct 18- Oct 22 | Implementing the algorithm Adding the branch to communicate with tool |
| Week 10:
Oct 25- Oct 29 | Implementing Firefox add-on front end structure. |
| Week 11:
Nov 01- Nov05 | Working on the Traffic Rank factor one |
| Week 12:
Nov08- Nov 12 | Implementing number of visitors viewed a web site |
| Week 13:
Nov 15- Nov 19 | Due Deliverable 04 |
| Week 14:
Nov 22- Nov 26 | Summarize all deliverables and present |
| Week 15:
Nov 29- Dec 03 | Work on Deliverable 5: CS297 Report. |
| Week 16:
Dec 06- Dec 10 | Deliverable 5 due: CS297 Report |
Deliverables:
The full project will be done when CS298 is completed. The following will
be done by the end of CS297:
1. Study and understand set of Algorithms [Page Rank Algorithm, Hits, Bloom Filters, Porter stemming Algorithms]
2. Study and Report on Dr.Pollett's search engine code
3. Writing simple extension to Firefox
4. Adding a branch to the search Trunk of Yioop.com search engine code and make it communicate with tool
5. CS 297 Report
References:
[1]Google's Page Rank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer-2006
[2] Programming Firefox: Building Rich Internet Applications with XUL. Kenneth C. Feldt. O'Reilly. 2007
[3]"http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Building_an_Extension":Official page of Mozilla.
[4] JavaScript- complete by Steven Holzner- 1998
Article References:
[1] Konstantin Avrachenkov and Nelly Litvak. The effect of new links on Google Page Rank. Technical report, INRAIA, July 2004
[2] Matthew Richardson and Pedro Domingos.The Intelligent Surfer:
Probabilistic Combination of Link and Content Information in PageRank.
Advances in Neural Inforamtion Processing Systems, 14:1441-8, 2002.
[3] Taher H. Haveliwala (1999). Efficient computation of PageRank. Technical report, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
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