Khmer Web Search: homepage discovery and publisher routing

Over the past week, the focus for Khmer Web Search shifted from core indexing stability toward building out the discovery layer. A blank search bar is only useful if you already know what you’re looking for. To make the platform a true daily utility, I needed to surface what’s happening on the Khmer web right now.

Quick glances and hourly metrics

The first major addition is the Quick Glance infrastructure. Search engines are often used to answer simple, real-time questions. I built a new polling loop in the backend pipeline to collect hourly metrics like Phnom Penh weather, daily gold prices, and exchange rates.

These are now exposed directly on the new frontend homepage. It instantly gives the page some utility beyond just keyword retrieval.

Trending and recent pickups

To make the index feel alive, I wired up new backend APIs to drive the frontend discovery modules:

• Trending Searches: Real-time aggregation of search query events to surface what users are looking for.
• Newly Published Articles: A live feed of the most recent documents acquired by Khrawler, providing a quick view of the latest news across all indexed publishers.
• Popular Sources: A curated chip list of authoritative domains to help users jump straight to trusted news outlets. I also moved publisher favicons to static serving for better frontend performance and reliability.

Source navigation pages and routing

The most structurally significant change was how the engine handles publisher intent. Often, a user doesn’t just want news about a topic; they want to know what a specific publisher said about it.

I updated the indexing registry to explicitly include source navigation pages and expand their aliases. On the frontend, I built dedicated source pages. This allows users to scope their search queries entirely within a single publisher’s domain, effectively giving every indexed source its own mini search engine.

Try it out

These pipeline expansions and frontend modules are live now. You can check out the new discovery homepage and try the publisher filtering at khmerwebsearch.com.