Search engine class

It's official- I'll be teaching a class entitled "Search Engine Development" in the spring semester, COMP 475. The prerequisites are COMP 245 (Data Structures) and 250 (Internet Development I). This course will count as one the 3 electives required for the CS-BS degree or one of the 2 electives required for the CS-BA degree.

In this course we'll be learning how search engines like Google are able to return a relevant set of search results from the Web in milliseconds. The following topics will be covered:

• Web characterization
• History of web search
• Information retrieval (IR)
• Web crawling
• Deep web
• Content indexing
• Query processing
• Search results ranking (e.g., PageRank and HITS)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Adversarial IR
• Personalization of search results

There will be several team projects utilizing open source software to build a search engine.

This course will be useful for anyone interested in doing research that could lead to presenting work at a major conference or in getting an internship at a search engine company.

The textbooks I'm currently looking at for this course include:

• Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings by Langville and Meyer
  


• Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data by Soumen Chakrabarti
  

If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know by leaving a comment.