Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Multimedia Information and Systems)

Web Dragons offers a perspective on the world of Web search and the effects of search engines and information availability on the present and future world.

In the blink of an eye since the turn of the millennium, the lives of people who work with information have been utterly transformed. Everything we need to know is on the web. It's where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones. Search engines make it possible for us to find the stuff we need to know. Search engines ― web dragons ― are the portals through which we access society's treasure trove of information. How do they stack up against librarians, the gatekeepers over centuries past? What role will libraries play in a world whose information is ruled by the web? How is the web organized? Who controls its contents, and how do they do it? How do search engines work? How can web visibility be exploited by those who want to sell us their wares? What's coming tomorrow, and can we influence it?

As we witness the dawn of a new era, this book shows readers what it will look like and how it will change their world. Whoever you are: if you care about information, this book will open your eyes and make you blink.

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. He has written several books, the latest being Managing Gigabytes (1999) and Data Mining (2000), both from Morgan Kaufmann.

Professor Gori's research interests are in the field of artificial intelligence, with emphasis on machine learning and game playing. He is a co-author of the book “Web Dragons: Inside the myths of search engines technologies,” Morgan Kauffman (Elsevier), 2007. He was the Chairman of the Italian Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is in the list of top Italian scientists kept by VIAAcademy

(http://www.topitalianscientists.org/top_italian_scientists.aspx). Dr. Gori is a fellow of the IEEE, ECCAI, and IAPR.