Online Course: Text Retrieval and Search Engines

Very nice to course to learn how to implement search engine. Thanks to the course, I was able to build a basic search engine in C# having features introduced in the course such as:

Ranking Functions:
  -- BM25, Pivoted Length Normalization for Vector Space Model (IDF, TF transformation, doc length normaliation)
  -- JM and Dirichlet Prior Smoothing for Language model based query likelihood
  -- PageRank and HITS from Link Analysis

Feedback Functions:
  -- Rochhio algorithm with implicit feedback for VSM
  -- KL divergence model for LM

Inverted Indexing and Map-reduce

Web-crawler:
  -- breadth-first search, parallel, focused search

Link: https://www.coursera.org/course/textretrieval

Elastic Search Cookbook

The book is nice and easy for someone who just starts learning ElasticSearch. Interesting reader can get the book from:

http://www.amazon.com/ElasticSearch-Cookbook-Alberto-Paro/dp/1782166629

There are some parts which i feel a bit verbose such as when explaining the installation and different ways of search, query, map, etc (which will be useful for reference anyway) as i only need to understand a subset of these command while explore the rest in the wild (e.g., http://java.dzone.com/articles/elasticsearch-java-api). While I did read through most of the materials, the book seems to me a bit week to present in a short and concise way to get someone immediately up-to-speed with working with various features of elastic search. However, coupled with a bit of online resources, it is actually quite easy to get started and toy with elastic search.