I was working on my project and our ML model was taking a lot of time to process the data. That kept me wondering how does Google and other search engines work. Thus I began exploring it on the side.

This course is an introductory one on search engine design and analysis. I don’t know why it isn’t called Introduction to Information Retrival after the famous book by researchers at Google and Standford. It dives deep into how copious amounts of data are stored and efficient methods created to access it. Ranging from various Indexing strategies, Efficient data structures and data processing methods (Remembers painful nights debugging Hadoop assignments ), Systems architecture of such system and the implications for Hardware, cost etc.

I do have Data Analytics as a subject in my last semester. As most of the academics around the world is disrupted by COVID-19, this course was no exception. The instructor is trying his best to give all the good sources for further readings, some of which I have skipped and will revisit some other day on this blog.

Search engines are some of the fantastic software built by humans, and a lot of sweat and tears go into making them efficient and user-friendly, and that’s something I have come to respect. It is one of the most exciting topics I have come across in computer science.

I will create and maintain a new blog post for links of Interesting stuff I find about Information Retrieval. For now, stay safe, stay healthy and try to learn something new today.