Web information retrieval (Q358305)

Web information retrieval has become one of the most important applications of the Web. Indeed, due to the abundance and velocity with which data has been and is put on the Web, retrieving the information appropriate for a particular purpose has become both challenging and an almost daily performed task. The applications where information found on the Web is between important and crucial, is needed, is critical, or is used as a basis for, say, decision making are numerous and manifold, and they keep growing. As the editors of this book state in the preface: ``While information retrieval was developed within the librarians' community well before the use of computers, its importance boosted at the turn of the century, with the diffusion of the World Wide Web. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google and Yahoo!, were the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web information. Searching capabilities are now integrated in most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.'' So it comes as no surprise that an understanding of what happens in Web information retrieval from a technical perspective is crucial for anybody studying or working in Computer Science. The intention of this book is to survey the field from a variety of angles. Ceri and his co-authors take their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to advanced challenges of Web information retrieval. Their book is divided into three parts: The first part addresses the principles of information retrieval and provides a systematic and compact description of basic techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models, classification and clustering, natural language processing for search). The second part addresses the foundational aspects of Web information retrieval and discusses the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describes link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addresses recommendation and diversification, and finally covers advertising in search. The third part describes advanced aspects of Web search, from several directions. Topics in this part include publishing data on the Web, meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, as well as human computation and crowd search. With this selection of topic, the book covers not only a wide range, but everything that is essential to the topic of Web information retrieval. It is not a replacement for a classical textbook on information retrieval, but it takes this general theme into the various corners that a relevant to the Web these days. All chapters are relatively short and hence easy to digest, yet mastering the topic dealt with in a chapter will almost certainly require additional study. Nevertheless, this book is an excellent starting point into the field of Web information retrieval, and can be recommended for classroom use. Accompanying material for instructors is available from \url{http://www.search-computing.org./web-information-retrieval-book}.