I am working on a search engine design, which is to be run on cloud. We have just started, and have not much idea about Hdoop. Can anyone tell if HBase , MapReduce and HDFS can work on a single machine having Hdoop installed and running on it ?
Yes you can. You can even create a Virtual Machine and run it on there on a single "computer" (which is what I have :) ).
The key is to simply install Hadoop in "Pseudo Distributed Mode" which is even described in the Hadoop Quickstart.
If you use the Cloudera distribution they have even created the configs needed for that in an RPM. Look here for more info in that.
HTH