This was my first project I ever did.
It was during my first year in computing science.
I had no prior knowledge of programming besides a introductory course in C++.
But when the opportunity arose during a security lecture I just had to grab it.
The security teacher was befriended with a research Journalist Huub Jasper.
He wanted an easy way to search trough the Wikileaks documents that just got leaked at the time.
So he asked our Security professor if he knew some students that might be interested.
The following lecture he asked the whole lecture room who was interested and 5 people raised their hands.
Erik Boss, [Sjors Gielen], Rik Harink, Nick Overdijk and Dennis Brentjes (me).

The project was pretty time intensive and I had to learn a lot and be quick on my feet as I was the least knowledgeable member of the group at the time.
But in the long run this project was a fun and wonderful experience.
The cooperation with the Research Journalists was refreshing.
In a way they are power-users of search machines, but they don't necessarily know how to express their power-user needs.
This became obvious when we started testing the first versions of the software with small group of researchers.
Some of them compared this to another search engine called Lexus Nexus and highlighted missing features.
Some of these features were then implemented by us.

The project culminated in the [VVOJ][] [Legebeke Legaat 2011][] where Huub Jaspers presented this product to a large group of Dutch of research Journalist.
We also hosted a small workshop on the site which unfortunately was planned alongside other interesting  talks and therefore didn't attract that many people.
But the research tool did come up during a discussion panel with some prominent editors of the Dutch press.
The discussion was focused on how to disclose the information contained in the Wikileaks documents now this search engine exists.
The documents were un-redacted, and could pose serious threats to the people disclosed in those documents.
Huub Jasper explained that only other journalists that approached him, VPRO or Argos would get access.
This was decided by Huub Jasper in the beginning of our project.
Although other public search engines did exists it was a matter of principle to not disclose possibly dangerous information.
Also the added capabilities to search for dates and geo-coordinates made him decide to make it publicly available.

But looking back at this project we could have done things differently.
All things considered we used standard search engine techniques like reversed indexes.
We were able to do full text search, search for dates and date ranges and even tried our hand on geo-coordinates.
The search engine tailored to the needs of these particular researchers.
The problem though is that we had no idea how to process these relatively large datasets.
We kept everything in memory which was barely possible.
So the system stopped scaling after the Iraqi and Afghanistan war-logs were added.

Nowadays we should be able to solve these problems or even use and extend a standard search engine system like Xapian.
Something we didn't find when looking for standard solution when we begun with this project.

The logo was created by Erik Boss

[Sjors Gielen]: http://sjorsgielen.nl/
[VVOJ]: http://www.vvoj.nl/
[Legebeke Legaat 2011]: http://www.vvoj.nl/2011/10/24/programma-legebeke-legaat-2011/