Search engines : information retrieval in practice

Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice is ideal for introductory information retrieval courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in computer science, information science and computer engineering departments. It is also a valuable tool for search engine and information retrieval professionals.

Written by a leader in the field of information retrieval, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice , is designed to give undergraduate students the understanding and tools they need to evaluate, compare and modify search engines. Coverage of the underlying IR and mathematical models reinforce key concepts. The book's numerous programming exercises make extensive use of Galago, a Java-based open source search engine.

• 1 Search Engines and Information Retrieval p. 1
• 1.1 What is Information Retrieval? p. 1
• 1.2 Search Engines p. 6
• 1.3 Search Engineers p. 9
• 1.4 Book Overview p. 10
• 2 Architecture of a Search Engine p. 15
• 2.1 What is an Architecture? p. 15
• 2.2 Basic Building Blocks p. 16
• 2.3 Breaking It Down p. 19
• 2.3.1 Text Acquisition p. 19
• 2.3.2 Text Transformation p. 21
• 2.3.3 Index Creation p. 24
• 2.3.4 User Interaction p. 25
• 2.3.5 Ranking p. 27
• 2.3.6 Evaluation p. 29
• 2.4 How Does It Really Work? p. 30
• 3 Crawls and Feeds p. 33
• 3.1 Deciding what to search p. 33
• 3.2 Crawling the Web p. 33
• 3.3 Directory Crawling p. 34
• 3.4 Document Feeds p. 34
• 3.5 The Conversion Problem p. 34
• 3.6 Storing the Documents p. 35
• 3.7 Detecting Duplicates p. 36
• 3.8 Removing Noise p. 39
• 4 Processing Text