Understanding Search Engines

Michael W. Berry is a Professor and Interim Department Head in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee and a faculty member in the Graduate School in Genome Science & Technology Program at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His current research interests include information retrieval, data mining, scientific computing, computational science, numerical linear algebra, and parallel computation. Murray Browne is a Research Associate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He is a member of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and has published numerous essays, book reviews, newspaper articles, and feature stories.

'There is no other information retrieval/search book where the heart is the mathematical foundations. This book is greatly needed to further establish information retrieval as a serious academic, as well as practical and industrial, area.' Jaime Carbonell, Carnegie Mellon University 'Berry and Browne describe most of what you need to know to design your own search engine. Their strength is the description of the solid mathematical underpinnings at a level that is understandable to competent engineering undergraduates, perhaps with a bit of instructor guidance. They discuss the algorithms used by most commercial search engines, so you may find your use of Google and its kind becomes more effective, too.' George Corliss, Marquette University. 'This book gives a valuable, generally non-technical, insight into how search engines work, how to improve the users' success in Information Retrieval (IR), and an in-depth analysis of a mathematical algorithm for improving a search engine's performance. ...Written in an informal style, the book is easy to read and is a good introduction on how search engines operate...' Christopher Dean, Mathematics Today 'Anyone interested in building their own search engine, or looking for a compact and readable introduction to the field of modern information retrieval will find this book to be an excellent first introduction.' Tony Donaldson, MAA Reviews

• Preface to the Second EditionPreface to the First EditionChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: Document File PreparationChapter 3: Vector Space ModelsChapter 4: Matrix DecompositionsChapter 5: Query ManagementChapter 6: Ranking and Relevance FeedbackChapter 7: Searching by Link StructureChapter 8: User Interface ConsiderationsChapter 9: Further ReadingBibliographyIndex.