Search Engine Concepts

Core Concepts

Indexing

Document: Unit of data (product, article, user)
Field: Attribute within document (title, description)
Index: Collection of documents with same structure
Mapping: Schema defining field types and analyzers

Process:
1. Extract text content
2. Tokenize (split into terms)
3. Normalize (lowercase, stemming)
4. Build inverted index
5. Store for retrieval