Search Technologies

The use of search technologies to locate relevant information from within increasingly voluminous archives of online digital media is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous and vital technology for daily life both in social and working environments. These archives include formally published text materials, heterogeneous web content, social media, audio-visual content, and various forms of enterprise content. The efficient location and delivery of content from these archives is enabling many exciting opportunities, increasing social engagement, creative exploitation of information, improved efficiency in business operations. However, realizing systems to perform reliable search and discovery of information, and effective delivery to users poses many challenges. This module introduces relevant search technologies and explores applications such as web search, image and video search, enterprise search and mobile search applications. The module covers key search topics, including content indexing, file structures, algorithms to support retrieval; related technologies such as content summarization, speech and video processing; and user interaction in search and evaluation of search systems.