Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business

UC Berkeley Webcast course

INFO 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business

Instructor Marti Hearst

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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

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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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				Search Technology Review - Dr. Marti Heart
				The Economics of Internet Search - Prof. Hal Varian: Chief Economist, Google, and Professor, UCB
				Combating Web Spam - Dr. Marc Najork: Microsoft Research
				Privacy and Online Information - Chris Hoofnagle, J.D.: Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
				Review and Discussion
				Multimedia Search - Dr. Lynn Wilcox: FXPal
				Intellectual Property and Search - Jason Schultz, J.D.: Intellectual Property Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
				Veterans Day
				Personalization and Search - Dr. Jaime Teevan: Microsoft Research
				How Search Engines Shape Our View of Cyberspace - Dr. Geoff Nunberg: Adjunct Professor, UCB School of Information (Clip played during lecture has been removed)
				The Future of Search - John Battelle: SearchBlog and Battelle Media
				Search for the Developing World - Course Summary and Evaluations

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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