Title: Web Search Technologies

Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis

agerasoulis@ask.com
Office: Hill 442

Web Search has been one of the greatest success stories for Computer science during the last 10 years. It is now the second most popular application on the web after email. Surprisingly very little has been published in this area and books are non-existent. In this seminar we will study the foundational technologies behind Web Search with more emphasis On Ranking technologies. More specifically:

1. A historic Overview of Search Engines
2. An Overview of Crawling, Parsing, Indexing.
3. Ranking Technologies and Signals
- Text score, word proximity
- Link Popularity, Page Rank, Local Page Rank and related methods
- Machine Learning technologies
4. Google, Microsoft Live search technologies.

Time permitting we might utilize public domain search engines to experiment with the concepts. Participants will be assigned a specific area to review and present the findings for the class.

A sample of references:

Page Rank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank (and references in Wikipedia)
History of Google
David Vise and Mark Malseed (2005). The Google Story, 37. ISBN ISBN 0-553-80457-X.
Machine Learning Technologies:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/