Articles Search Engine

A desktop news search application built with Java Swing and Apache Lucene. The app indexes a CSV of CNN articles and lets you search by keywords, author, category, or headline with pagination, sorting, and result highlighting.

Project structure

• src/mye003/searchenginenews/ — GUI, controllers, services, and DTOs for the search experience.
• resources/ — CNN_Articles_clean.csv dataset, Lucene index output directory (resources/index), and the application logo.
• lib/ — Third-party dependencies (Apache Lucene 10.x modules, OpenCSV, Apache Commons Lang).
• bin/ — Compilation output directory when building locally.

Prerequisites

• Java 17 or later (the project was developed against JDK 21).
• No external services are required; all dependencies are vendored in lib/.

Building

1. From the repository root, compile the sources into bin/:

   javac \
     -d bin \
     -cp "lib/commons-lang3-3.17.0.jar:lib/opencsv-5.10.jar:lib/lucene_modules/*" \
     $(find src -name "*.java")

   On Windows, replace the classpath separators (:) with semicolons (;).

2. Ensure the resources/ directory remains alongside the compiled classes so the CSV and index folder are accessible at runtime.

Running

After compiling, launch the Swing GUI from the project root:

java -cp "bin:lib/commons-lang3-3.17.0.jar:lib/opencsv-5.10.jar:lib/lucene_modules/*" mye003.searchenginenews.SearchEngineNewsGUI

The application will build a Lucene index from resources/CNN_Articles_clean.csv on first run (or if the resources/index directory is missing). Subsequent launches reuse the existing index for faster startup.

Features

• Multi-field search: Choose keywords, author, category, or article title (second headline) as the search field.
• Relevance tuning: Lucene-based TF-IDF scoring with lightweight boosting informed by recent search history.
• Result presentation: Clickable article titles, snippets with highlighted query terms, published date display, and alphabetical sorting option.
• Pagination: Ten results per page with quick navigation controls.

Troubleshooting

• If indexing fails, delete the resources/index directory and restart the app to trigger a rebuild.
• Ensure your working directory is the repository root when running so relative paths to resources/ resolve correctly.