Information Retrieval – Early Developments – The IR Problem – The User‘s Task – Information versus Data Retrieval - The IR System – The Software Architecture of the IR System – The Retrieval and Ranking Processes - The Web – The e-Publishing Era – How the web changed Search – Practical Issues on the Web – How People Search – Search Interfaces Today – Visualization in Search Interfaces.

Basic IR Models - Boolean Model - TF-IDF (Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency) Weighting - Vector Model – Probabilistic Model – Latent Semantic Indexing Model – Neural Network Model – Retrieval Evaluation – Retrieval Metrics – Precision and Recall – Reference Collection – User-based Evaluation – Relevance Feedback and Query Expansion – Explicit Relevance Feedback.

A Characterization of Text Classification – Unsupervised Algorithms: Clustering – Naïve Text Classification – Supervised Algorithms – Decision Tree – k-NN Classifier – SVM Classifier – Feature Selection or Dimensionality Reduction – Evaluation metrics – Accuracy and Error – Organizing the classes – Indexing and Searching – Inverted Indexes – Sequential Searching – Multi-dimensional Indexing.

The Web – Search Engine Architectures – Cluster based Architecture – Distributed Architectures – Search Engine Ranking – Link based Ranking – Simple Ranking Functions – Learning to Rank – Evaluations -- Search Engine Ranking – Search Engine User Interaction – Browsing – Applications of a Web Crawler – Taxonomy – Architecture and Implementation – Scheduling Algorithms – Evaluation.

IR applications-Information Extraction-Question answering- Opinion summarization- General Applications-Digital libraries-Information filtering-Media search-Search engines—Domain specific applications-Expert search finding-Geographic information retrieval- Case study on information retrieval methods in Text Minings