CS 860

Search Engines: From Design to Implementation

Fall 2009

T-Th 2:30-3:50pm

MC 2036

Instructor: Alejandro Lspez-Ortiz Office hours: Thursday 11:00-12:00

Email: alopez-o@uwaterloo.ca

Phone: 519-888-4567, ext. 33284

Office: DC 2339

The goals are to study the computational aspects of the design and implementation of a search engine, such as crawling, data structures for indexing, techniques for ranking of solutions, etc.

Topics:

Crawling

Tokenization

Indexing

Query Evaluation

Ranking

Training

Current challenges

Models of web search

Slaying the web beast

Future of web search

Textbook

Introduction to Information Retrieval

C. D. Manning (Stanford), P. Raghavan (Head of Yahoo! Labs), H. Sch|tze (Stuttgart) .

Cambridge University Press, 2008 (available at the university bookstore)

Other sources

SIGIR Conference

WWW Conference

CIKM Conference

Course structure

Part I: Lectures from textbook

Two assignments 10% each

Part II: Student projects

Written proposal 10%

Survey of current work 20%

(presentation+literature survey)

Project presentation 20%

Project report 30%

Late Policy: On the due date, assignment should be submitted in class. Late assignments can be submitted before noon in my office (DC 2339). There is a penalty of 10% for every day late.

Collaboration: You are encouraged to discuss assignments with other classmates. However, the submitted assignment should be your own work. Note that current School of Computer Science policy states that a mark of -100% can be recorded for the assignment for all parties involved in a case of blatant cheating/copying.

Academic Integrity: In order to maintain a culture of academic integrity, members of the University of Waterloo community are expected to promote honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility.

Grievance: A student who believes that a decision affecting some aspect of his/her university life has been unfair or unreasonable may have grounds for initiating a grievance. Read Policy 70 - Student Petitions and Grievances, Section 4, http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy70.htm

Discipline: A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity to avoid committing academic offenses and to take responsibility for his/her actions. A student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offense, or who needs help in learning how to avoid offenses (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) or about rules for group work/collaboration should seek guidance from the course professor, academic advisor, or the undergraduate associate dean. For information on categories of offenses and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71, Student Discipline,

http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy71.htm.

For typical penalties check Guidelines for the Assessment of Penalties,

http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/guidelines/penaltyguidelines.htm.

Appeals: A decision made or penalty imposed under Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances (other than a petition) or Policy 71, Student Discipline may be appealed if there is a ground. A student who believes he/she has a ground for an appeal should refer to Policy 72, Student Appeals,

http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy72.htm.

Note for students with disabilities: The Office for Persons with Disabilities (OPD), located in Needles Hall, Room 1132, collaborates with all academic departments to arrange appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities without compromising the academic integrity of the curriculum. If you require academic accommodations to lessen the impact of your disability, please register with the OPD at the beginning of each academic term.

Avoiding Academic Offenses: Most students are unaware of the line between acceptable and unacceptable academic behaviour, especially when discussing assignments with classmates and using the work of other students. For information on commonly misunderstood academic offenses and how to avoid them, students should refer to the Faculty of Mathematics Cheating and Student Academic Discipline Policy, http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/navigation/Current/cheating_policy.shtml