Search Engines 201
Want to dive deep -- really deep -- into the technical literature about search engines? Here's a road map to some of the best web information retrieval resources available online.
Want to dive deep -- really deep -- into the technical literature about search engines? Here's a road map to some of the best web information retrieval resources available online.
Want to dive deep — really deep — into the technical literature about search engines? Here’s a road map to some of the best web information retrieval resources available online.
Longtime SearchDay readers know I’m an avowed technical literature junkie. I’m talking the heavy-duty, industrial strength type of stuff that’s typically buried in PDF or PostScript files on remote servers at academic institutions or in technical journals.
You can find a treasure trove of links to this type of information in the modestly titled Web IR & IE, a directory of web information retrieval and information extraction resources compiled by information scientist Einat Amitay.
The site is organized into sections. conferences and online proceedings has links to the major events where information scientists gather and share information. These gatherings are quite different than Search Engine Strategies shows.
Other section of the site provide links to influential people working in the field, working groups attempting to hammer out standards, and resources–tools to help you build your own search engine.
Want to communicate with the gurus? Links to mailing lists and newsgroups show you where to find the online watering holes.
My favorite sections of the site are selected publications, PhD/MSc related work, and books. Here you can find Jon Kleinberg’s groundbreaking “Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment” paper that influenced Google and Teoma. Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s early description of Google, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” is also represented.
And the seminal work that influenced all three of the above authors is also here: Eugene Garfield’s 1955 (!!!) “Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas,” a must read if you want to understand the genesis of what we today call link analysis on the world wide web.
And if you still haven’t had your fill, related sites points you elsewhere for more. I love Einat’s description of Search Engine Watch: “A commercial web site about search engine development and related news. It might be a bit “non academic” but this is the real world…”
If you’re relatively new to the technical literature about web information retrieval, start with the overview and resources I wrote about in Search Engines 101. Another good resource is covered in How Search Engines Make Sense of the Web.
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication’s search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.