Implement Reverse Indexing in C++

[pedrobiqua]

We need to implement a reverse indexing system in C++ to optimize document retrieval and improve the search efficiency in our search engine. Reverse indexing will allow us to associate each word with a list of documents or pages where it appears, facilitating keyword-based search.

Tasks:

• Define the Data Structure:
  Use an efficient structure to store the index (e.g., std::unordered_map or std::map), where the key is a word and the value is a list of documents/pages.

• Document Parsing:
  Implement a function to process documents or web pages, tokenizing them into words and populating the reverse index.
  Remove punctuation and normalize the text to lowercase.

• Update the Index:
  Implement logic to update the index as new documents are added or removed.

• Search Query:
  Implement a function that, given a word, returns the corresponding documents/pages using the reverse index.

• Testing:
  Create unit tests to ensure that the index works correctly and that queries return the expected results.
  Test with different dataset sizes to evaluate performance.

Requirements:

• Familiarity with STL data structures (maps and lists).
• Basic knowledge of string manipulation and text processing in C++.

References:

• Explanation of Inverted Index
• Guide to Text Processing in C++