Date Thursday, February 6, 2003, 6:30pm
Location University of Maryland, McKeldin Library
Speaker Dr. Denise Bedford, The World Bank
Everyone knows the phrase "search engine." Most people who use search engines think of them like automobiles - they make
their choices based on the look and feel of the appearance and published recommendations. Like automobiles, though, there are different kinds of engines - and ultimately it is the engineering that counts. Different
search engines have different parts, and they are engineered in different ways. If you look under the hood of a BRS, a Google, a Converra or an Oracle Intermedia engine - will you find the same parts?
Which components come with the standard search engines? What flexibility do you have to customize the parts, or to add new ones? Where do neural networks, topic maps, thesauri, and translations fit into the engine?
What kind of query processing and matching algorithms fuel the search engine?
We will look at a logical component model of a search engine. We will reverse engineer some of our favorite search engines to gain a better
understanding of how they work today and to see how search engines will improve in the future.
Speaker Dr. Denise Bedford, Thesaurus Project Manager, Information
Solutions Group, World Bank, Washington DC
Associate Faculty Member, Catholic University of America School of Library and Informaiton Science, Washington DC
