{"id":26836598,"url":"https://github.com/vickshan001/imdb-search-engine-project","last_synced_at":"2026-05-06T22:02:41.041Z","repository":{"id":285164495,"uuid":"957259247","full_name":"vickshan001/IMDb-Search-Engine-Project","owner":"vickshan001","description":"NLP-powered IMDb search engine with Flask backend using BM25 and TF-IDF for smart movie retrieval and ranking.","archived":false,"fork":false,"pushed_at":"2025-03-29T23:28:55.000Z","size":0,"stargazers_count":0,"open_issues_count":0,"forks_count":0,"subscribers_count":1,"default_branch":"main","last_synced_at":"2025-03-30T00:22:25.103Z","etag":null,"topics":["bm25","flask","imdb","information-retrieval","movie-search","nlp","python","react","search-engine","tf-idf"],"latest_commit_sha":null,"homepage":"","language":"HTML","has_issues":true,"has_wiki":null,"has_pages":null,"mirror_url":null,"source_name":null,"license":null,"status":null,"scm":"git","pull_requests_enabled":true,"icon_url":"https://github.com/vickshan001.png","metadata":{"files":{"readme":"README.md","changelog":null,"contributing":null,"funding":null,"license":null,"code_of_conduct":null,"threat_model":null,"audit":null,"citation":null,"codeowners":null,"security":null,"support":null,"governance":null,"roadmap":null,"authors":null,"dei":null,"publiccode":null,"codemeta":null}},"created_at":"2025-03-29T23:22:26.000Z","updated_at":"2025-03-29T23:30:27.000Z","dependencies_parsed_at":"2025-03-30T00:32:36.423Z","dependency_job_id":null,"html_url":"https://github.com/vickshan001/IMDb-Search-Engine-Project","commit_stats":null,"previous_names":["vickshan001/imdb-search-engine-project"],"tags_count":0,"template":false,"template_full_name":null,"repository_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/vickshan001%2FIMDb-Search-Engine-Project","tags_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/vickshan001%2FIMDb-Search-Engine-Project/tags","releases_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/vickshan001%2FIMDb-Search-Engine-Project/releases","manifests_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/vickshan001%2FIMDb-Search-Engine-Project/manifests","owner_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners/vickshan001","download_url":"https://codeload.github.com/vickshan001/IMDb-Search-Engine-Project/tar.gz/refs/heads/main","host":{"name":"GitHub","url":"https://github.com","kind":"github","repositories_count":246343410,"owners_count":20762031,"icon_url":"https://github.com/github.png","version":null,"created_at":"2022-05-30T11:31:42.601Z","updated_at":"2022-07-04T15:15:14.044Z","host_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub","repositories_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories","repository_names_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repository_names","owners_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners"}},"keywords":["bm25","flask","imdb","information-retrieval","movie-search","nlp","python","react","search-engine","tf-idf"],"created_at":"2025-03-30T16:20:24.154Z","updated_at":"2026-05-06T22:02:36.016Z","avatar_url":"https://github.com/vickshan001.png","language":"HTML","funding_links":[],"categories":[],"sub_categories":[],"readme":"# 🎬 IMDb Smart Search Engine\n\nAn intelligent NLP-powered search engine that allows users to query and explore IMDb's top 1000 movies using natural language. Built as part of a **group project for the \"Information Retrieval\" module (2024)**.\n\n---\n\n## 👥 Group Contribution\n\nThis project was developed collaboratively as part of our university coursework.  \n**The backend** (Flask API, data preprocessing, ranking models) was designed and implemented by **Vickshan Vicknakumaran** and a teammate.  \nThe **frontend** (React-based UI) was handled by other team members.\n\n---\n\n## 📌 Project Overview\n\n**IMDb Smart Search Engine** helps users find relevant movies using natural queries like:\n\n\u003e “Action film with Leonardo DiCaprio from the 2000s”\n\nInstead of relying on exact title matches, the system ranks results using semantic similarity via **BM25** and **TF-IDF**.\n\n---\n\n## 📱 Features\n\n- 🔎 Search by title, genre, director, actors, or keywords\n- 🧠 Ranking with **BM25** and **TF-IDF cosine similarity**\n- 🧹 Preprocessing with NLTK (tokenization, stopwords, stemming)\n- ⚡ RESTful API using Flask\n- 🔄 CORS enabled for React frontend integration\n- 📈 Based on IMDb Top 1000 dataset (CSV)\n\n---\n\n## 🛠 Technologies Used\n\n- **Backend**:\n  - Python, Flask, NLTK\n  - BM25Okapi (`rank_bm25`)\n  - Scikit-learn (TF-IDF, cosine similarity)\n  - Pandas\n  - Flask-CORS\n\n- **Frontend**:\n  - React (handled by front-end team members)\n\n\n## 💡 How It Works\n\n- User submits a search query via the React frontend\n- Flask backend receives the query, preprocesses it with NLTK\n- Two models (BM25 \u0026 TF-IDF) rank the top matching movies\n- Combined and deduplicated results are returned as JSON\n- Frontend displays results with movie posters and metadata\n\n---\n\n## 🖼️ Screenshots\n\n\u003cp align=\"center\"\u003e\n  \u003cimg src=\"screenshots/Slides_page-0009.jpg\" width=\"250\"/\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\n---\n\n## 🔮 Future Improvements\n\n- Use Transformer models (e.g. BERT) for context-aware ranking\n- Add user preferences/history for personalized results\n- Integrate movie streaming service availability\n- Build chatbot-style interface\n\n---\n\n## 📂 Example API Call\n\n\nReturns:\n\n```json\n{\n  \"search_results\": [\n    {\n      \"Series_Title\": \"The Dark Knight\",\n      \"Genre\": \"Action, Crime, Drama\",\n      \"Director\": \"Christopher Nolan\",\n      \"Stars\": [\"Christian Bale\", \"Heath Ledger\", \"Aaron Eckhart\", \"Michael Caine\"],\n      \"IMDB_Rating\": 9.0,\n      ...\n    }\n  ]\n}\n\n\n##📚 Module Information\n-📘 Module: CI6416 – Information Retrieval\n-🎓 Year: 2024\n-🏫 University: Queen Mary, University of London\n\n","project_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Fvickshan001%2Fimdb-search-engine-project","html_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/projects/github.com%2Fvickshan001%2Fimdb-search-engine-project","lists_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Fvickshan001%2Fimdb-search-engine-project/lists"}