Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice [Hardcover]

Bruce Croft (Author), Donald Metzler (Author), Trevor Strohman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0136072240 | ISBN-13: 978-0136072249 | Edition: 1

Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice is ideal for introductory information retrieval courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in computer science, information science and computer engineering departments. It is also a valuable tool for search engine and information retrieval professionals.

 

Written by a leader in the field of information retrieval, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice , is designed to give undergraduate students the understanding and tools they need to evaluate, compare and modify search engines.  Coverage of the underlying IR and mathematical models reinforce key concepts. The book’s numerous programming exercises make extensive use of Galago, a Java-based open source search engine.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

W. Bruce Croft is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which he joined in 1979. In 1992, he became the Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), which combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners. He has published more than 180 articles related to information retrieval. Dr. Croft was elected a Fellow of ACM in 1997, received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2000, and received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in 2003.

Donald Metzler is a Research Scientist in the Search and Computational Advertising group at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, CA. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in 2007. During his graduate studies he was awarded a Microsoft Live Labs Graduate Fellowship. His research interests include formal information retrieval models, web search, advertising, and machine learning.

Trevor Strohman is a software engineer in the Google search quality division. His Ph.D., from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focused on high-performance text retrieval systems that are easily adaptable to fit specific retrieval applications. He has published papers and presented a tutorial at the top information retrieval conference, SIGIR. He is the creator of the Galago search engine, and the primary developer of the Indri search engine (www.lemurproject.org/indri). He has ten years of professional software development experience, including desktop, server, and web applications.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 552 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley; 1 edition (February 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0136072240
• ISBN-13: 978-0136072249
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.9 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Could be much, MUCH better... May 5, 2012

By B. Preciado

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

It could be that I have ridiculously high standards when it comes to a good read, but the inability of an author from time to time to write cogent sentences that follow one another logically is too egregious to me.

Too often I'm mystified because a sentence which should be present to link two points together is missing, forcing me to spend an extra minute or two trying to make the connection myself - sometimes without being completely sure. Other times, the poor flow of the writing or lack of sufficient background explanation leaves me feeling like I've been bounced around haphazardly.

The explanations of a few of the formulas are pretty lacking.

I'd say the most that I will walk away with from this text is a pretty good *feel* for the field since it does do a fair job at explaining the concepts that are inherently straightforward. I want to say kudos to them for managing not to botch it to that extent, but it's nothing to be proud of. If you want the best gist of the subject possible, get this book. If you want a thoroughly analytical, and expert type of understanding without undue headache, do not buy.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars clear and comprehensive introduction to search engine technology April 8, 2011

By Gregor Erbach

Format:Hardcover

A clearly written and well-structured introduction to the science and technology of search engines. The book covers all aspects of search engines from crawling to the web all the way to the ranking and presentation of the result list in a clear, well-structured and rigorous fashion. The book includes the major algorithms and data structures, as well as explaining the mathematical models of ranking results, categorization and clustering. Practical problems like character encoding, document formats and multilingual retrieval are addressed in sufficient detail. The focus of the book is on the standard approaches in full-text search engines, and the final chapters give brief introductions to related topics like audio, image and music retrieval and emerging fields like social search and peer-to-peer search. The book contains plenty of references to the latest research. The book can be highly recommended for students of computer science.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to Information Retrieval October 23, 2010

By Chun-hyok Chong

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's great for introduction to the Information Retrieval.

The former part of the book is filled with very good idea and clues for the information retrieval, for example, the characteristic of word or text, rank, page | site revisits, rough search engine architecture.

But the latter part of the book is so~so~.
The equations are good but the book doesn't explains the derivations of them and it seems that the book almost just lists the summations of the the Page Rank or Word Rank up.

In short, Good, Interesting~!