Survey and Analysis of Courses on the Subject of Information Retrieval and Web Search

In this paper, we present the result of our survey and analysis of courses on the subject of information retrieval and web search offered by colleges and universities in the U.S.A. and in China. We collected the information available on the web about 40 relevant courses. We concentrate on the goals of the course, main contents covered, textbooks used, and the student programming projects. Most these courses are offered either for upper level undergraduate through entry level graduate students in the area of computer science and computer engineering or for students from the information science and linguistics science. These courses concentrate on the technical aspects of information retrieval. For example, the computer science courses mostly deal with information processing and search over the web while a linguistic or information science course may discuss more the language aspect and information science aspect. There is also a segment of courses designed for general audience who are the end users of information retrieval systems. These courses discuss more on the user interface, human factors, and social impact of the web search technologies. We believe the information presented in the paper will help design, implementation, or revision of courses on the subject of information retrieval with various target audience in mind, especially for students at the undergraduate level.