Inside the Belly of a Search Engine

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.