Muddiest Point: 3/21/11

It seems that the global method of query expansion has a very high risk of returning more irrelevant documents than relevant ones or are too costly to maintain effectively. Are there certain situations where the global method would be preferable over the local method?

Unit 10: Web Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval on the web is extremely difficult, due to the Internet's enourmous size and the sheer variety of information it contains. There are no formatting or information organization standards for the Web. There have been many different methods used to create a search engine that could navigate the Internet effectively. Initial models required uses to submit a web site for indexing. Sites such as Yahoo! attempted to categorize websites so that users could browse without using queries. Google's approach, crawling the web and indexing information based on the structure of hypertext, has proven to be the most effective.

Unit 9: User Interaction and Visualization

User interface is an essential part of an information retrieval system. Human computer interaction is a large part of creating a successful user experience.

Key design principles of information retrieval are offering informative feedback, reduce working memory load, provide alternative interfaces for novice and expert users.