Implementation of web product search engine (Part I)

• Main Author: Wong, Sunny Sin Chun.
• Other Authors: Hoi Chu Hong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48458
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Online shopping is gaining popularity as the preferred mode of shopping as opposed to being physically at a shop. This mode is also preferred because it reduces the amount of time needed to purchase products by allowing the users to quickly perform a search on their items of choice without having to window shop through an entire shopping mall. The rivalry between these online shops also encourages more innovations in term of ease of finding products and purchasing them. Traditionally, search engines only accept text as a form of query and users will have to describe the physical products they are looking for, which often leads to inaccurate results. For e-Commerce websites, this is increasingly becoming an issue, as users will have difficulty accurately explaining how a certain product looks like in order to find it. By allowing the users to send queries in the form of image, users can then allow search engines to figure out the products more accurately and therefore get more relevant results. The purpose of this project is to develop such an e-Commerce website with the ability to search based on text and images either saved locally on their disks, or hosted on external websites. The users can further refine the results by selecting on several filters or by cropping a selection of the original search image. To allow users to perform these searches and going through the results easily, a User Interface is needed. This interface must be fast to load and easy to use. Through the use of modern web technologies such as hypertext markup, cascading style sheets and JavaScript, the author demonstrates how integration between the user interface and the search engines can deliver a good experience for the users. The ability to easily maintain and extend the website’s current functionality is also considered as a priority in order to allow future modules to be integrated easily.