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Preliminary draft (c)2007 Cambridge UP
xx Preface
the whole Web would rapidly become impossible, due to the Web’s expo-
nential growth in size. But major scientific innovations, superb engineering,
the rapidly declining price of computer hardware, and the rise of a commer-
cial underpinning for web search have all conspired to power today’s major
search engines, which are able to provide high-quality results within subsec-
ond response times for hundreds of millions of searches a day over billions
of web pages.
Book organization and course development
This book is the result of a series of courses we have taught at Stanford Uni-
versity and at the University of Stuttgart, in a range of durations including
a single quarter, one semester and two quarters. These courses were aimed
at early-stage graduate students in computer science, but we have also had
enrollment from upper-class computer science undergraduates, as well as
students from law, medical informatics, statistics, linguistics and various en-
gineering disciplines. The key design principle for this book, therefore, was
to cover what we believe to be important in a one-term graduate course on
information retrieval. An additional principle is to build each chapter around
material that we believe can be covered in a single lecture of 75 to 90 minutes.
The first eight chapters of the book are devoted to the basics of informa-
tion retrieval, and in particular the heart of search engines; we consider this
material to be core to any course on information retrieval. Chapter 1 in-
troduces inverted indexes, and shows how simple Boolean queries can be
processed using such indexes. Chapter 2 builds on this introduction by de-
tailing the manner in which documents are preprocessed before indexing
and by discussing how inverted indexes are augmented in various ways for
functionality and speed. Chapter 3 discusses search structures for dictionar-
ies and how to process queries that have spelling errors and other imprecise
matches to the vocabulary in the document collection being searched. Chap-
ter 4 describes a number of algorithms for constructing the inverted index
from a text collection with particular attention to highly scalable and dis-
tributed algorithms that can be applied to very large collections. Chapter 5
covers techniques for compressing dictionaries and inverted indexes. These
techniques are critical for achieving subsecond response times to user queries
in large search engines. The indexes and queries considered in Chapters 1–5
only deal with Boolean retrieval, in which a document either matches a query,
or not. A desire to measure the extent to which a document matches a query,
or the score of a document for a query, motivates the development of term
weighting and the computation of scores in Chapters 6 and 7, leading to
the idea of a list of documents that are rank-ordered for a query. Chapter 8
focuses on the evaluation of an information retrieval system based on the