[tor-dev] [GSOC 16] Ahmia : Hidden service search engine

[Ismael R]

Hi everyone !

My name is Ismael and I'm a french student in information security.
I will be working on the Ahmia search engine for this year's Google 
Summer of
Code.

Before going back to school, I was working as a "full-stack" developer 
for a web
agency. This is why I have a little experience with the tech I will be 
using for this
project. I'm also more free-software and privacy conscious since a 
couple months,
that's why I'm really happy to contribute to the Tor Project.

I will be working from 23 May to 21 August with my mentors Juha Nurmi 
(numes)
and George Kadianakis (asn). I plan to send bi-weekly reports on tor-dev at .

I have several major goals:

Review code and infrastructure
This is the part where I focus on code quality, test cases, automation and
fixing bugs. I want to make existing features work better, faster, easier.

Improve the search experience
It all starts with indexing more information about hidden services:
- Browse links on the same hidden service and treat them as different search
results
- Get a screenshot of the page and display it on search results
- Using statistics (popularity, backlink) to give search results a score and
sort them.
Then, the search engine should accept commands (think duckduckgo's 
!bangs) or
parameters (think google's site:*).
Finally, (and I'm not sure I will have the time to implement this) consider
using natural language processing techniques to better understand the 
search's
query or a page's title, description or content.

Statistics
What should we be collecting? Can it improve search results? How can we 
share or
visualize the data?

You can read my complete project proposal on Google doc [1] or download a
pdf [2]. I'm open to suggestions or questions. You can reach me by email or
IRC (nick: zma).

Cheers,
Ismael

[1] : https://goo.gl/AT37hA
[2] : http://dl.free.fr/f6EMq8vOu