Customer Reviews

Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the best book I have seen on the Web and the Internet. It is very thorough and covers topics ranging from Web graphs, to search engines, to customer behavior and ecommerce. It is up to date, well organized. I highly recommend it.

I gave two stars to be charitable. The authors assume an incredible amount of background knowledge on behalf of the reader, in fact the book is more a review of this assumed knowledge rather than a tutorial or exposition of the topics. Equations and symbolic logic are incorporated needlessly to explain many simple concepts, but when applied to complex topics, these same rigorous techniques are given no supporting explanation. If you can follow the non-explanations the authors provide, you likely have already mastered this subject area and don't need to read this book at all. If you are new to the field, you will be stumped by the shallow coverage of complex theory, and this is even for people with graduate level computer science or mathematics. These authors need a better editor, someone who actually cares if the reader has any idea what is going on.

The internet and the web have become a wonderful field for applying mathematical methods to huge amounts of uncontrolled information. The ultimate contribution of this book, I think, is to present techniques by which results that are meaningful and useful for people -- such as text analysis and categorization, or relevance of web pages, or recommendation systems -- can emerge from the application of cold mathematical formulas. The mathematical tools are not necessarily new and may be hard to follow by non-experts (this is mostly Machine Learning, probability, etc). To fully appreciate the book, one needs to grasp the math, but I think the text is sufficiently interesting so that the book can also be enjoyed by people who don't like to read the math. The book is fairly comprehensive about modeling important processes that happen everyday on the web.

An interesting book with a mathematical viewpoint on search, navigation, ecommerce and other aspects of the Web. Could be written more clearly in places. The competing text by Chakrabarti is a gentler introduction to the field. All the same, the review by 'unknown comic' below seems inaccurate. Although the book may be fairly technical in places, it should be accessible to students and researchers in fields like engineering, computer science, math, and statistics. Worth a look for quantitative researchers interested in what we can learn from Web data.