A good source of textbookish readings for IR material + Links for/from today's class (including why "miserbale failure" didn't work)..

["Subbarao Kambhampati" <rao@asu.edu>]

First, off, here is an NYT article explaining that as of Jan end, 2007, Google decided to
quit acting all innocent and hand-removed the miserable failure google bomb link to
whitehouse


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29google.html


On a more serious front, I added a new uber-link in the readings list to a draft text book on
on information retrieval that is freely available on the web. 

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/%7Eschuetze/information-retrieval-book.html

You might consider consulting it as 
a good additional source of readings on topics discussed in the class 
(note: some chapters are more drafty than others) 

You can find discussion on how to statistically estimate relative index sizes of search engines in chapter
19 (section 19.5). The specific link is:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/pdf/chapter-webchar.pdf

That whole chapter is a quick overview of web search issues/challenges. 

 distributed index and crawling discussion can be found in the next chapter: ch 20. 

cheers
Rao