Current search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are prevalent for searching the Web. Search on dynamic client-side Web pages is, however, either inexistent or far from perfect, and not addressed by existing work, for example on Deep Web. This is a real impediment since AJAX and Rich Internet Applications are already very common in the Web. AJAX applications are composed of states which can be seen by the user, but not by the search engine, and changed by the user using client-side events. Current search engines either ignore AJAX applications or produce false negatives. The reason is that crawling client-side code is a difficult problem that cannot be solved naively by invoking user events. The challenges are: lack of caching, duplicate states detection, very granular events, reducing the number of AJAX calls and infinite event invocation. This paper sets the stage for this new search challenge and proposes a solution: it shows how an AJAX Web application can be crawled in the granularity of the application states. A model of AJAX Web sites is presented. An AJAX Crawler and optimizations for caching and duplicate elimination are defined, and finally, the gain in search result quality and corresponding performance price are evaluated on YouTube, a real AJAX application.

Current search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are prevalent for searching the Web. Search in dynamic pages, however, is either inexistent or far from perfect. AJAX and Rich Internet Application are such applications. They are increasingly frequent on the Web (in YouTube, Amazon, GMail, Yahoo!Mail) or mobile devices and are offering a high degree of interactivity to the user, by seamlessly loading content from the server without the need to refresh the page. Current search engines cannot correctly index AJAX applications. This produces false positives and false negatives, because search engines do not understand the application logic that loads content dynamically. Crawling an AJAX application is a difficult problem. Since the user invokes events on the page, crawling must identify the different application states generated by the client-side logic. This demo sets the stage for this new type of search and shows that a search engine for AJAX can be built. Among others, the challenges, as opposed to traditional search engines, are: automatically identifying states by triggering events, efficiently crawling application states, avoiding the invocation of potentially very numerous events, scalability in the number of events, duplicate elimination of states, result presentation and aggregation, ranking. The demo presents the AJAX search engine: crawler, indexer and query processor, applied on a real application and showcases challenges and solutions.

Google and other products have revolutionized the way we search for information on the Internet, Intranet, and on our desktop. However, the current generation of search products does not exploit the structure and semantics of data, as defined by application programs (e.g., Word or Excel) that generate the data. This paper shows how search technology can be enhanced with implicit predicates, in order to take into account the structure and semantics defined by applications. Better search results are produced with tolerable performance overhead, while at the same time maintaining the simplicity of the keyword search interface.