Question

I am a student at university and our task is to create a search engine. I am having difficulty generating a unique id to assign to each url when added into the frontier. I have attempted using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm as well as Guid. Here is the code that i used to implement the guid:

public string generateID(string url_add)
{
    long i = 1;

    foreach (byte b in Guid.NewGuid().ToByteArray())
    {
        i *= ((int)b + 1);
    }

    string number = String.Format("{0:d9}", (DateTime.Now.Ticks / 10) % 1000000000);

    return number;
}

Answer 1

Why not just use ToString?

public string generateID()
{
    return Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N");
}

If you would like it to be based on a URL, you could simply do the following:

public string generateID(string sourceUrl)
{
    return string.Format("{0}_{1:N}", sourceUrl, Guid.NewGuid());
}

If you want to hide the URL, you could use some form of SHA1 on the sourceURL, but I’m not sure what that might achieve.