Monday, November 17, 2008

Search Engine Development offered this spring

I'll be offering a special class entitled Search Engine Development (COMP 475) this spring semester. This is the second time I've taught this class, but it will likely not be offered again for another couple of years. The pre-requisites are COMP 245 (Data Structures) and 250 (Internet Development I).

We'll be using Java to build a web crawler, indexer, and rank results. At the end of the semester, we'll have a fully-functional web search engine.

Here are some of the topics we'll be covering:
  • 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

Below are some slides I shared last Fri morning in our Computing Seminar on adversarial information retrieval on the Web, one of the topics we'll cover in class.

Posted by Frank McCown at 11/17/2008 09:51:00 AM
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5 comments:

  1. Tanton11/19/2008 12:16 AM

    Looks like a fun course...good luck! Let me know when you are ready to come work for the evil empire ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frank McCown11/20/2008 8:53 AM

    Tanton- Is that a job offer? I doubt Microsoft could ever match my Harding salary. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tanton11/20/2008 11:37 PM

    That is true, I doubt they could even come close to Harding's magnanimous offering. However, we do have Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, a lot of rain, and starbucks on every corner ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ahmed Jabr12/06/2008 3:12 PM

    Dear Assoc. Prof. Dr. Frank McCown,
    I'm master student and my project is based on on-line plagiarism detection with collaboration of search engines. I'v used your java code that quering Google through ajax API. Briefly the idea is to extract N-Grams from the collected corpus and compare it with the suspected document. Unfortunately the result returned from the JSon object is too short and of no help. I'm wondered if there is any other option to retrive the whole document even using other search engines other than Google.
    Thank you,
    Ahmed Jabr
    UTM, Malaysia

    ReplyDelete
  5. Frank McCown12/08/2008 8:36 AM

    Ahmed,

    I'm not sure if I understand your problem. It might be easier to email me. See my home page for my email address.

    ReplyDelete

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