This course teaches principles, tools and techniques for Internet information retrieval. Students will be able to develop automated access software to webpages, to analyze their link structures, to index them according to their contents, to rank them with respect to specific queries, to apply information retrieval tools, computational linguistics and hyperlink graph structural understandings to improve the searching results. Students will also be given chances to create their own innovative ideas for web searching in the group project.

For a student to pass the course, at least 30% of the maximum mark for the examination must be obtained.

A formative assessment will be made on the students' ability to apply tools and knowledge to different situation. The equal weighting of coursework and examination assessment is due to the emphasis on both the practicality and the theory of market design models.