Want a detailed glimpse into the black boxes we call search
engines? Mining the Web is a textbook that discusses everything
from building your own crawler to the future of information
finding on the web. Search engines are designed to be simple to
use. Type a few words into a query box, and voila, you're
presented with a set of probable results that match your
information need. This simplicity masks some heavy-duty
complexity. Although we refer to a "search engine" in the
singular, Google, Teoma, AlltheWeb and others are actually
software systems made up of a number of components, each
specialized and tuned to perform a specific function that
contributes to the whole. Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge
from Hypertext Data is one of the first books that actually
describes, in detail, the parts of contemporary search engines
and how they function. The author, Soumen Chakrabarti, is an
assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the
Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and the book reveals