i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Most IR research has been focused on static information retrieval as if we are retrieving information from physical and digital libraries, and those techniques are what we have learned as part of this course. However, increasingly, researchers have become interested in the dynamic and temporal nature of information on the Web.

The sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically and semantically valid sentence in English and a great example of the challenges homophony presents for IR. Although a search engine would index this as 8 instances of the same word, there are actually three variations of “buffalo”:

Google completely revolutionized the way search was performed when it brought out the concept of Page Rank in webpages. Pages which were "legitimate" so to speak were given more weight as compared to the others and this started the prolific trend of SEO companies that we see today. Trying to make your website more "friendly" for the spider to take notice of you and increase the number of back links to your websites using numerous link building measures only seemed to add to the choreographed process of Search Engine Optimization.

Did you enjoy working with the text tools?

A nice list of the longest German words. However, it is important to note that German is not as awkward as it seems to be. This is clearly an artifact of German bureaucracy.

http://german.about.com/library/blwort_long.htm

Btw: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz means "beef labeling regulation & delegation of supervision law"