With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications. Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search. The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) was formed in the Computer Science Department ofthe University ofMassachusetts, Amherst in 1992. The core support for the Center came from a National Science Foun- tion State/Industry/University Cooperative Research Center(S/IUCRC) grant, although there had been a sizeable information retrieval (IR) research group for over 10 years prior to that grant. Thebasic goal ofthese Centers is to combine basic research, applied research, and technology transfer. The CIIR has been successful in each of these areas, in that it has produced over 270 research papers, has been involved in many successful government and industry collaborations, and has had a significant role in high-visibility Internet sites and start-ups. As a result of these efforts, the CIIR has become known internationally as one of the leading research groups in the area of information retrieval. The CIIR focuses on research that results in more effective and efficient access and discovery in large, heterogeneous, distributed, text and multimedia databases. The scope of the work that is done in the CIIR is broad and goes significantly beyond “traditional” areas of information retrieval such as retrieval models, cross-lingual search, and automatic query expansion. The research includes both low-level systems issues such as the design of protocols and architectures for distributed search, as well as more human-centered topics such as user interface design, visualization and data mining with text, and multimedia retrieval.

This text presents a theoretical and practical examination of the latest developments in Information Retrieval and their application to existing systems. By starting with a functional discussion of what is needed for an information system, the reader can grasp the scope of information retrieval problems and discover the tools to resolve them. The book takes a system approach to explore every functional processing step in a system from ingest of an item to be indexed to displaying results, showing how implementation decisions add to the information retrieval goal, and thus providing the user with the needed outcome, while minimizing their resources to obtain those results. The text stresses the current migration of information retrieval from just textual to multimedia, expounding upon multimedia search, retrieval and display, as well as classic and new textual techniques. It also introduces developments in hardware, and more importantly, search architectures, such as those introduced by Google, in order to approach scalability issues. About this textbook: A first course text for advanced level courses, providing a survey of information retrieval system theory and architecture, complete with challenging exercises Approaches information retrieval from a practical systems view in order for the reader to grasp both scope and solutions Features what is achievable using existing technologies and investigates what deficiencies warrant additional exploration