Basics of Search Engines and their History

Basics of search engine algorithms (web crawling, building indexes, etc.). How has the field evolved? How have the services that search engines provide changed through the years? From WebCrawler to Inktomi to Yahoo!. How does Google's PageRank work? The use of WWW link structure to identify authoritative sources for user queries.

• J. Kleinberg, and S. Lawrence. The structure of the Web, Science 294, 1849-1850, November 2001. The paper which addresses the overall structure of the web with "core", "in", "out", and "other" sections. http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse522/CurrentQtr/kleinberg_structure_of_the_web.pdf
• PageRank patent.
• http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/. Another explanation of PageRank.

For the more technically inclined:

• Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. 1998. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems v. 30. http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf. The original paper describing PageRank.
• Jon Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. 1999. Journal of the ACM v. 46(5). http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf.
• A. Altman and M. Tennenholtz. Ranking Systems: The PageRank Axioms, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 1-8, 2005. A paper which shows that under certain assumptions PageRank is the only ranking allowed. http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse522/CurrentQtr/pagerankaxioms.pdf