Croft, alumni co-author new textbook on search engines
“Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice,” a new textbook by Computer Science professor Bruce Croft and two Ph.D. alumni, Donald Metzler, ’07, and Trevor Strohman, ’08, has been published by Addison-Wesley.
The first textbook on search engines and information retrieval (IR) aimed at undergraduates, “Search Engines” is designed to give students the understanding and tools they need to evaluate, compare and modify search engines. The programming exercises in the book make extensive use of Galago, a Java-based open source search engine developed within the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR).
Croft is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science, which he joined in 1979. In 1992, he became the director of CIIR, which combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners. He has published more than 200 articles related to information retrieval. Croft was elected a Fellow of ACM in 1997, received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2000, and received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in 2003. He received a Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Award in 2007-08. During his Conti Fellowship year, Croft spent a significant amount of time working on the completion of the book.
Metzler is a research scientist in the search and computational advertising group at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, Calif. During his graduate studies he was awarded a Microsoft Live Labs Graduate Fellowship. His research interests include formal information retrieval models, web search, advertising and machine learning.
Strohman is a software engineer in the Google search quality division. His Ph.D. focused on high-performance text retrieval systems that are easily adaptable to fit specific retrieval applications. He is the creator of the Galago search engine used in the book, and the primary developer of the Indri search engine. Strohman has 10 years of professional software development experience, including desktop, server and web applications.
More Information
Additional information on book
February 18, 2009.
E-mail story to a friend
Printer-friendly version
/more people/
