Teaching web information retrieval to undergraduates

Abstract

Courses centered around the field of Web Information Retrieval (IR) and web search are slowly being introduced at the undergraduate level. In this paper, we show how the curriculum for a new undergraduate course on web search engines was developed, and we share our experiences in having students develop their own search engine components from scratch or modify and extend a popular open source search engine. We hope our experiences will be helpful to other Computer Science departments that are looking to develop an undergraduate Web IR course. Copyright 2010 ACM.