building
Olivia
Olivia is an end-to-end search engine demo that crawls websites, indexes web pages, computes ranking signals like PageRank, and delivers fast, relevant search results through a FastAPI backend and a React frontend. The project is designed as a practical playground for experimenting with web crawling, information retrieval, search ranking, and search quality evaluation.
- Role
- Full Stack Developer
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- building
- Updated
- Aug 5, 2026
Overview
Olivia is a self-hosted search engine designed to replicate the core components of modern search systems. It crawls websites, extracts page content and links, stores the crawl data, computes ranking signals, indexes documents into Elasticsearch, and serves ranked search results through a responsive web interface.
The project focuses on building a reliable and explainable search pipeline while providing tools to evaluate retrieval quality and system performance.
Challenges
Building a search engine involves coordinating several distributed components while maintaining efficient indexing and retrieval performance.
Designing a scalable crawling pipeline, implementing effective ranking signals, and balancing search relevance with response speed were among the primary engineering challenges.
Ensuring that evaluation metrics accurately reflected improvements in ranking quality was another key focus throughout development.