time: Monday and Wednesday, 12:30-1:45 PM
location: Manning Hall, Room 304
instructor: Diane Kelly, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
email: dianek [at] email [.] unc [.] edu
telephone: 919.962.8065
office: Manning Hall, Room 204
office hours: Monday, 2:00-4:00 and by appointment
home page: http://ils.unc.edu/~dianek/
Description
490-123 Web Search and Interaction (3). The course provides an overview of the field of information retrieval (IR), with a focus on Web-based applications and information search interactions. The historical development of IR, Web search engines and other Web-based IR applications such as recommender and filtering systems will be explored. Basic principles of search technology will be presented, including searching algorithms, ranking functions and user feedback. This course will also consider the relationship between users' online information search behaviors and search functionality.
This course is ONLY open to INLS undergraduates. This course is most appropriate for upper-level IS undergraduate majors and minors. Pre-requisites: INLS 200 and INLS 261, or permission from instructor.
This is not a programming course. We'll study search algorithms, but we won't actually implement any. We'll do some math, especially during the first half of the class. You will need to know how to: add, subtract, multiple, divide, and take the square-root. You will need to be comfortable working with whole numbers, decimals and fractions.
Objectives
- Students will gain an understanding of the history, development and evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems, with an emphasis on web search engines.
- Students will gain an understanding of the information search behaviors of Web users and how these behaviors can be used to improve searching.
- Students will demonstrate a basic understanding of search engine algorithms, performance metrics and web log analysis.
- Students will develop critical reading and analytical writing skills including the abilities to read, synthesize, integrate and critique published research.
Required Texts
This course has one required textbook:
- Levene, M. (2006). An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation. London, UK: Addison Wesley Publishing.
In addition to the textbook, our readings will be supplemented by articles and book chapters. You can access most of these readings through the UNC Library. Many are available via the ACM Digital Library (available through the UNC Library). I will place readings that aren't available online in a password protected directory, which you can access via our course web page. Note that all of these readings are required.
- Belkin, N. J. (2000). Helping people find what they don't know. Communications of the ACM, 43(8), 58-61. [ACM Digital Library]
- Belkin, N. J. (1996). Intelligent information retrieval: Whose intelligence? ISI '96: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium for Information Science. Konstanz: Universtaetsverlag Konstanz, 25-31. [Online]
- Borlund, P. (2003). The concept of relevance in IR. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(10), 913-925. [UNC Electronic Journal]
- Card, S. K., Pirolli, P., van Der Wege, M., Morrison, J. B., Reeder, R. W., Schraedley, P. K., & Boshart, J. (2001). Information scent as a driver of web behavior graphs: Results of a protocol analysis method for web usability. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seattle, WA, 498-505. [ACM Digital Library]
- Church, K., Smyth, B., Cotter, P., & Bradley, K. (2007). Mobile information access: A study of emerging search behavior on the mobile Internet. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), 1(1), Article No. 4. [ACM Digital Library]
- Freyne, J., Farzan, R., Brusilovsky, P., Smyth, B., & Coyle, M. (2007). Collecting community wisdom: Integrating social search and social navigation. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Honolulu, HW, 52-81. [ACM Digital Library]
- Gyongyi, Z., & Garcia-Molina, H. (2005). Spam: It's not just for inboxes anymore. IEEE Computer, 38(10), 28-34. [IEEE Explore]
- Kellar, M., Watters, C., & Shepherd, M. (2007). A field study characterizing Web-based information-seeking tasks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 58(7), 999-1018. [UNC Electronic Journal]
- Liddy, E. (2001). How a search engine works. Searcher, 9(5), http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may01/liddy.htm
- Teevan, J., Alvarado, C., Ackerman, M. S., & Karger, D. R. (2004). The perfect search engine is not enough: A study of orienteering behavior in directed search. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, 415-422. [ACM Digital Library]
- Voorhees, E. M., & Harman, D. K. (2005). TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval (Ch. 1), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [[http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10667&mode=toc]]