[bambax]

Week 3 is "Crawling the web" (the whole Web??!?) and Week 4 is "Responding to search queries"; shouldn't "Building an index" be somewhere in Week 3.5?

Do people need to learn how to build a search engine for the Web, complete with crawling and PageRank, etc., or do they rather need to know how to build a search engine for a specific corpus of documents that they have sitting around somewhere...?

[devans]

Week 4 is mostly about building an index.

The point of the class isn't for people to build their own personal search engine to actually use, but to use the experience of building and understanding a search engine as a vehicle for introducing computer science and programming.

[riffraff]

I guess week 4 would go like "to answer the query X we go through all the data, this is slow, so let's build an index"