Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice [Hardcover]

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

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0136072240 | ISBN-13: 978-0136072249 | Publication Date: February 16, 2009 | 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: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #124,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

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

By 

Chun-hyok Chong "Chunhyok" (Korea, South) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice (Hardcover)

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~!

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

By 

Gregor Erbach (Saarbrücken) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice (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.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best IR textbook I have ever used, May 12, 2009

By 

Jonathan Abourbih "jonbc" (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice (Hardcover)

This is probably one of the best IR textbooks I have seen. I used a pre-release edition for a text technologies course at the University of Edinburgh this year. The explanations are clear and interesting, the examples are compelling, and the authors' style is engaging. I'd recommend this book for any course on information retrieval.