Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images
Author: Ian Witten, Ian H. Witten, Allistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell
List Price: $62.95
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ISBN: 1558605703
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (15 May, 1999)
Sales Rank: 46,348
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
The Wonderful Thing Is: It's the Only One
This is the only book there is that will actually teach you how to build an information retrieval system (aka search engine). It discusses all the algorithms and tradeoffs, and comes with free downloadable source code to experiment with. Some of the material is standard, but covered in more implementation detail here than anywhere else. Some of the material is novel: you won't find better coverage of compression unless you hand-assemble twenty research papers, and reverse-engineer them to figure out how they're implemented. But with "Managing Gigabytes", it's all here. (Although, after a particularly envigorating discussion of how to string together a bunch of techniques to compress their corpus and save a couple 100MB, I did a check and found you could buy 512MB of RAM for less than the cost of the book. Knowledge is Power, but sometimes a little cash is more powerful.) The only negative is that this book is not called "Managing Terabytes", as the first edition promised/threatened it might be. RAM and disk are cheap, but not that cheap, and for now terabytes (and sometimes petabytes) are managed only by NASA, Google, and a few others. I can't wait to see the third edition!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Very clear, but misses some key real-world issues
As others have said, MG is a good introductory text for Information Retrieval. However I think it spends a little too much time on compression techniques and lacks a good discussion of incremental or on-line indexing. The book tends to assume that the set of texts to be searched is static - if new documents can be added or old ones deleted it makes the whole problem much harder and many of MG's techniques are no longer relevant. That said, I strongly look forward to Managing Terabytes (if it ever appears).
Rating: 4 out of 5
Good introduction to searching/indexing in data.
MG gave a good introduction to the components of practical Information Retrieval (IR). You can clearly see that the authors have a genuine interest in the field! But, I would like some more theoretical analysis of the algorithms used(i.e. O-notation), and more focus on parallell implementations of IR systems. Another book related to the same area worth mentioning is "Modern Information Retrieval".
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