ABSTRACT
By all measures, the Web is enormous and growing at a staggering rate. It is increasingly crucial for both people and programs to have quick and accurate access to web information and services. Thus, it is imperative to provide users with tools for efficient and effective resource and knowledge discovery. Search engines have assumed a central role in the Web’s infrastructure as its scale and impact have escalated. The unabated growth of the Web and the increasing expectations placed by users on search engines to anticipate and infer information needs and provide relevant results has fostered the development of the field of web Information Retrieval (Web IR). This chapter explicates the Web IR tools, its models, and its performance metrics. It also illustrates the architecture of a typical search engine with a special discussion on Google’s ranking mechanism, PageRankTM.
