mechanics of search
engines
How Search Engines
Work (Search Engine Watch)
Search Engines What they Are,
How They Work, and Practical Suggestions for Getting the Most Out of Them
(webreference.com)
How Internet
Search Engines Work (How Stuff Works)
The Anatomy
of a Search Engine (article by Brin & Page delivered at 7th
Int’l Web Conference, describing technical features of Google before it was
Google)
What happens, behind the
scenes, when you type a query into Google?
Google works. Pretty well. Should it bother us we don’t know exactly how?
Greg Notess, “The
Google Dance: A Database Update Saga”,
Online 27 (5), Sep/Oct 2003, 42-44
What is the Google
Dance? Why does it happen?
Mike Thelwall, “Subject
Gateway Sites and Search Engine Ranking” Online Information Review 26
(2), 2002, 101-107
Thelwall makes several
suggestions in his final sections for the design of gateway web sites. Do those recommendations make sense from an “information”
or “user” perspective? Why?
Henzinger, Motwani &
Silverstein, “Challenges
in Web Search Engines”, (pdf) ACM SIGIR Forum 36 (2), Fall 2002
The authors make a couple
of interesting assertions in section 1:
Users tend only to examine the first page of search results. (Why?)
The web is “full of noisy, low-quality, unreliable, and indeed
contradictory content”. (So why is it so
popular?)
How might you research
the questions they raise in the next to last paragraph of section 3?
What other kind of “implicit
feedback” (see section 4) can you think of in other information contexts?
In what ways in web
searching a hybrid between database and information retrieval searching? What does it share with each of those? How is it unique? Is it an entirely new model?
Consider this question,
from section 8: “What user interface
does not confuse users, does not clutter the screen, but still fully empowers
the experienced user?”. Clearly, Google
faces this, as does every information system.
How well do they succeed? Are
there other information services you think do a better job in this regard? What would an “ideal” information system look
like?
Monika R. Henzinger, “Web Information
Retrieval - an Algorithmic Perspective”, (postscript) Proceedings of the
8th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2000), pp. 1-8
Monika R. Henzinger, “Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval”,
(postscript) IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 23(3):3-8, 2000.
Richard Wiggins, "The Effects of
September 11 on the Leading Search Engine", First Monday 6
(10), 10/1/2001
Kruschwitz,
Udo, “Exploiting
Structure for Intelligent Web Search” (PDF) Proceedings of the
technology sites