Coding theory is the matrix algebra of information theory.
You should understand the meaning of the word &quot;homomorphism&quot; as it is used in Multilinear Algebra before you read about how search engines score results in an unbiased manner.<p>This is not the type of thing you can read by haphazardly browsing wikipedia.  Believe you me that I have tried inasmuch.  You need to buy books, read journal articles, and then learn through a graduate level math course.<p>The best advice I can give you is to read about how search engines calculate &quot;hits&quot;, and to search through scholar.google.com before you check wikipedia.org!