Finding Information is a key component in many applications: from recommending products on e-commerce platforms to diagnose cancer cells. Historically, information retrieval is tightly coupled with libraries. With the advent of computers and subsequently the internet, web retrieval and text search engines became the most prominent information retrieval domain.
In this course, we want to look at basic information retrieval concepts: indexing, retrieval models, querying, interfaces, evaluation. Further, we will have a look at current research trends focusing around machine learning to improve search. And finally, we look at web search, specifically at performance, crawling, link analysis, and social search.
