INFO 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business
Instructor Marti Hearst********************************************************
The full course is now available for free access via webcast:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978492
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Extracted here is some information about the course for fall 2007 from http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i141/f07/
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About the Instructor:
The instructor, Prof. Marti Hearst, is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
She has done extensive research on search user interfaces, was on the Science Advisory Board for Search at Yahoo from 2004-2005 and for Altavista from 2002-2004.
She will provide the introduction to the course, devise the homework assignments, and create lectures for topics that are not covered by other speakers.
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Synopsis
The World Wide Web brings much of the world's knowledge into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer and an internet connection.
The availability of huge quantities of information at our fingertips is transforming government, business, and many other aspects of society.
For most people, Web search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) are technologies which have enormous influence on how people find and think about information.
They are the gateways, (or some might argue, gate keepers) to this vast sea of information. With the rising importance of search engines come new legal, business, and policy questions and considerations.
This course will examine these issues via a series of lectures from experts in academia and industry.
Students will first gain an understanding of the basics of how search engines work, and then explore how search engine design impacts business and culture.
Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities.
We will schedule a set of top-notch experts to speak during Fall 2007
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Class Meetings
The course will consist of one 1.5-hour lecture per week...Each lecture will be delivered by one or more experts from academia or industry.
Each lecture will include time for question-and-answer sessions...
To better understand the issues, it is important to have an understanding of the underlying technology... Thus, in this course, students will learn and explore the basics of how search engines work via readings and homework exercises.
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Readings
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Required Book
There is a required book for this course:The Search by John Battelle.
Optional Suggested Book for Techies
For computer science students who are interested in independently studying how search engines work in detail:Mining the Web by Soumen Chakrabarti (the revised version of Modern Information Retrieval)
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Search Engine Resources
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i141/f07/resources.html
******************************************************** Search Engine News Aggregators
- SearchEngineLand: searchengineland.com
- SearchEngineWatch: www.searchenginewatch.com
- SearchEngineJournal: www.searchenginejournal.com
- SearchEngineShowdown: www.searchengineshowdown.com
Search Engine Blogs
- SearchBlog: battellemedia.com
- Jeremy Zawodny's blog: jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/
- GoogleBlog: googleblog.blogspot.com/
- SearchEngineWatch Blog: blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog
How to Search; Search Engine Tools
- GoogleGuide: googleguide.com
- How to Search at About.com: websearch.about.com/od/searchingtheweb
- SearchTools: searchtools.com
Articles on How Search Engines Work
- At SearchEngineWatch: searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2168031
- At HowStuffWorks: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine.htm
- Wikipedia on Web Crawling: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
Internet Glossaries
- Glossary of Internet Terms
- Glossary of Internet and Web Jargon: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Glossary.html
Articles about How the Internet/WWW Works
- Wikipedia on Internet Protocols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol
- How Stuff Works on Web Servers: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-server.htm
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Fall 07 Course Outline
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Keen to learn online?
The full course is now available for public via webcast at this url:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978492
