search-engine-lite

A fast, single-binary CLI that indexes a text file and lets you search it with ranked results. Designed for quick grepping with smarter scoring.

Features

• Indexes a plain text file into an in-memory inverted index
• Case-insensitive by default, optional case-sensitive matching
• AND/OR query modes
• Ranked results with frequency and proximity scoring
• Top-N limiting
• Interactive REPL mode
• Compact output suitable for scripting

Installation

Requirements: Rust 1.70+.

cargo build --release

The binary will be at target/release/search-engine-lite.

On Windows PowerShell, you can run the binary directly:

./target/release/search-engine-lite --file .\README.md --search rust

Usage

search-engine-lite --file ./notes.txt --search "rust indexing"
search-engine-lite --file ./notes.txt --search "pipeline" --mode or --limit 20
search-engine-lite --file ./notes.txt --interactive
search-engine-lite --file ./notes.txt --stats

Options

• --file <PATH>: Input text file to index (required)
• --search <QUERY>: One-off query string
• --mode <and|or>: Matching mode (default: and)
• --limit <N>: Max results to print (default: 10)
• --case-sensitive: Enable case-sensitive tokenization
• --interactive: Start an interactive prompt
• --stats: Print index stats and top frequent terms

Output

Each result prints: line_number score line_text Example:

42 3.125 Building a compact inverted index in Rust

Examples

• Quick lookup:

search-engine-lite --file ./README.md --search "inverted index"

• Browse interactively:

search-engine-lite --file ./README.md --interactive --limit 5

Performance notes

• Streaming read with a compact in-memory map
• Simple tokenizer tuned for ASCII and common punctuation
• Proximity scoring favors lines where query terms appear closer together

Development

cargo run -- --file ./README.md --search rust
cargo test

License

MIT