Teaching web information retrieval to undergraduates

Courses centered around the field of Web Information Retrieval (IR) and web search are slowly being introduced at the undergraduate level. In this paper, we show how the curriculum for a new undergraduate course on web search engines was developed, and we share our experiences in having students develop their own search engine components from scratch or modify and extend a popular open source search engine. We hope our experiences will be helpful to other Computer Science departments that are looking to develop an undergraduate Web IR course.

[1]  Geoffrey Zweig,et al.  Syntactic Clustering of the Web , 1997, Comput. Networks.

[2]  Hinrich Schütze,et al.  Introduction to information retrieval , 2008 .

[3]  Till G. Bay,et al.  Open source projects in programming courses , 2007, SIGCSE '07.

[4]  Juan M. Fernández-Luna,et al.  Teaching and learning in information retrieval , 2009, Information Retrieval.

[5]  R. Suganya,et al.  Data Mining Concepts and Techniques , 2010 .

[6]  Wendy Hall,et al.  Creating a Science of the Web , 2006, Science.

[7]  C. J. van Rijsbergen,et al.  Information Retrieval , 1979, Encyclopedia of GIS.

[8]  Andrei Z. Broder,et al.  Graph structure in the Web , 2000, Comput. Networks.

[9]  Michael L. Nelson,et al.  Agreeing to disagree: search engines and their public interfaces , 2007, JCDL '07.

[10]  Rajeev Motwani,et al.  The PageRank Citation Ranking : Bringing Order to the Web , 1999, WWW 1999.

[11]  Hsinchun Chen,et al.  Teaching key topics in computer science and information systems through a web search engine project , 2003, JERC.

[12]  Fidel Cacheda,et al.  Experiences on a practical course of web information retrieval: developing a search engine , 2008 .

[13]  Mark Levene,et al.  An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation (2. ed.) , 2005 .

[14]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Mining the Web: Discovering knowledge from hypertext data , 2004, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[15]  Michael L. Nelson,et al.  Lazy preservation: reconstructing websites by crawling the crawlers , 2006, WIDM '06.

[16]  Peter Willett,et al.  Readings in information retrieval , 1997 .

[17]  Mark Levene,et al.  Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice , 2011, Comput. J..

[18]  Stefano Mizzaro,et al.  Teaching of web information retrieval: web first or IR first? , 2007 .