INFO I427 Search Informatics (3 CR)
Google under the hood

Tentative schedule Fall 2008 -- will be updated as we go. Readings (from Belew's FOA) due ahead of each class. Assignments due by class time unless otherwise specified in class or on Oncourse.
Week Dates Topic Assignments Readings and notes
1 9/3-5 Intro to course, search engines, and Google: the biz buzz Ch 1
2 9/8-12 Unix review Review Perl: O'Reilly books, Books24x7 (free!)

STEPS Workshops:

All workshops at IUB Library Information Commons (IC103). Free workshops materials available from IT training
3 9/15-19 Perl review
4 9/22-26 More Perl review; LWP, CGI, DB_File and other modules
5 9/29-10/3 Web crawling Ch 8 and class notes
6 10/6-10 More Web Crawling A1 due Fri
7 10/13-17 Indexing (parsing, stopping, stemming, inverting) Ch 2
10/20 STEPS Workshop: Vi
8 10/20-24 More indexing A2 due Fri
9 10/27-31 Retrieval and ranking (VSM, similarity) Ch 3
Ch 6 (6.1-6.2), Google's PageRank Explained, and class notes
10 11/3-7 More retrieval and ranking
Link analysis (PageRank)
11 11/10-14 More link analysis
12 11/17-21 Search engine evaluation A3 due Mon Ch 4
13 11/24 The Google and Yahoo APIs (and their Perl/SOAP/REST interfaces) Download one of them and get it to work! Thanksgiving recess
14 12/1-5 More evaluation A4 due Wed
15 12/8-12 Review, Q&A on project, discussion Final project due Fri Free Week
16 12/15 Final exam 8-10 am in TBA