CPP Faculty Search Engine

A web-based search engine for Cal Poly Pomona faculty profiles, featuring a modern GUI interface with CPP's green and gold theme.

Features

• Web scraping of CPP faculty profiles
• TF-IDF based search algorithm
• Cosine similarity for result ranking
• Modern GUI interface with CPP branding
• Real-time search results
• MongoDB integration for data storage

Prerequisites

• Python 3.9 or higher
• MongoDB installed and running locally
• pip (Python package installer)

Dependencies

The following Python packages are required:

beautifulsoup4>=4.12.0
pymongo>=4.6.0
scikit-learn>=1.4.0
nltk>=3.8.1

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone <repository-url>
cd ScratchBuiltSearchEngine

2. Create and activate a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows, use: venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install the required dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Ensure MongoDB is running locally on port 27017:

# On macOS with Homebrew
brew services start mongodb-community

Usage

1. First, run the parser to collect faculty data:

python3 parser_1.py

This will scrape faculty profiles and store them in MongoDB.

2. Launch the search engine GUI:

python3 SearchEngineGUI.py

3. Use the search interface:
   • Type your search query in the search bar
   • Press Enter or click the Search button
   • View the top 5 matching results
   • Results are ranked by relevance

How It Works

Data Collection (parser_1.py)

• Scrapes faculty profiles from CPP's website
• Extracts text content from each profile
• Stores data in MongoDB for efficient retrieval

Search Engine (SearchEngineGUI.py)

1. Text Processing:

   • Tokenizes and stems search queries
   • Removes stopwords
   • Converts text to lowercase

2. Search Algorithm:

   • Uses TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) to convert text to vectors
   • Applies cosine similarity to rank results
   • Returns most relevant matches

3. User Interface:

   • Modern GUI with CPP's green and gold theme
   • Real-time search results
   • Scrollable results view
   • Responsive design

Troubleshooting

1. MongoDB Connection Issues:

   • Ensure MongoDB is running locally
   • Check if port 27017 is available
   • Verify MongoDB service status

2. Import Errors:

   • Make sure all dependencies are installed
   • Verify virtual environment is activated
   • Check Python version compatibility

3. SSL Certificate Issues:

   • The program includes SSL context handling
   • If issues persist, check your system's SSL certificates

Contributing

Feel free to submit issues and enhancement requests!

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Contact

For questions or feedback, please contact:

• Email: [email protected]