They have made encyclopedias obsolete: Web search engines like Google or Bing provide us with the information we are looking for at lightning speed. Surveys have shown that every Internet user searches via Google 3 to 4 times a day on average. In total, estimates assume more than 2 trillion search queries* per year, and the trend is rising. If you want to understand how these search engines work, this course is for you.
Are you curious about how web search engines provide you with information daily? Are you surprised at the speed at which web search engines are able to respond to your complex and sometimes incomplete queries? Are you wondering how to build your website so that it can be easily found by others through the search engine (search engine optimization)?
This two-week workshop aims to provide an introduction to how search engines operate in terms of how web pages are discovered, indexed, and retrieved to display information in a structured form to respond to queries (words used to search for information). We discuss how documents are clustered based on similarity and ranked based on query relevance to generate responses to user queries. As a concluding highlight, we consider various forms of visualizing search engine results and why search engines like Google remain popular.
What you'll learn
- understand how search engines structure queries
- understand how search engines discover and index web pages
- To make the best use of search engines
- Structure web pages so that they can be found easily
Who this course is for
people who use search engines, and who are concerned about privacy issues or tracking
Students who conduct research on the Internet using search engines as part of their studies
Auditors who use search engines to obtain information about companies
General public
