Study-Unit Description

Study-Unit Description



CODE CSA3216

 
TITLE Search Engine Technology

 
UM LEVEL 03 - Years 2, 3, 4 in Modular Undergraduate Course

 
MQF LEVEL Not Applicable

 
ECTS CREDITS 6

 
DEPARTMENT Intelligent Computer Systems

 
DESCRIPTION Search Engines are an important cornerstone of all Internet-based applications, together with traditional Database applications. Exciting new developments in the field have enabled large unstructured datasets to be handled alongside traditional structured data. Appropriate tools and techniques will be discussed together with a variety of examples involving all major components of a search engine using the Google architecture as a working example. This study-unit will cover the following topics:

• Fundamental Concepts of Information Retrieval
• Boolean, Vector, Probabilistic and Fuzzy Ranking Models
• Evaluation of Results, Precision and Recall
• Query Languages (Boolean, Probabilistic, SQL)
• Weighting of Query Terms
• Simple optimizations: Zipf’s Law, stop words, stemming
• Search Engine Architecture
• Ranking on the Web: Introduction to PageRank and HITS
• Multimedia Search Technology

Course work compliments the theoretical material and will involve a mixture of theoretical research and simple programming.

Textbooks:

• Baeza-Yates, Ricardo. Ribeiro-Neto, Berthier. 1999. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley, New York.
• Brin, Sergey. Page, Lawrence. 1998. “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. Stanford University, California.

 
RULES/CONDITIONS Before TAKING THIS UNIT YOU ARE ADVISED TO TAKE CSA1017 AND TAKE ICS2210

 
STUDY-UNIT TYPE Lecture

 
METHOD OF ASSESSMENT
Assessment Component/s Sept. Asst Session Weighting
Assignment Yes 100%

 
LECTURER/S Angelo Dalli

 

 
The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints.
Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice.
It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2025/6. It may be subject to change in subsequent years.


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