Search Engine Tools

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I'm writing a search engine and I'd like to add a few extras in. Specifically I'm looking for a (preferably free) thesaurus that I can integrate into the program. I'm also interested in any other tools monks have found useful, or think would be neat for such a project.

Thanks in advance :)

Comment on Search Engine Tools

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Re: Search Engine Tools by benn (Vicar) on Jun 30, 2003 at 01:48 UTC
For a plain-text thesaurus, the Gutenberg Roget's is available, but in a pretty nasty format :) Check out Lingua::Wordnet though, the interface to Wordnet which is a very comprehensive hierachical thesaurus / dictionary system. A couple more modules have appeared recently too - Wordnet::Similarity and Wordnet::QueryData - I haven't tried them out myself, but one of these is sure to fit your needs. Cheers, Ben.	[reply]
Re: Re: Search Engine Tools by allolex (Curate) on Jun 30, 2003 at 06:55 UTC
One quick caveat about WordNet (1.7), though. The synonyms listed there sometimes appear to be counterintuitive, which has to do with WordNet's primary use as a tool for studying meaning in language (it includes more than it excludes). You might be better off sticking to a more traditional dictionary for the purposes of finding simple synonyms. Maybe you could try it out and see if your searches return anything strange. -- Allolex	[reply]