For Fall semester 2017 I am teaching a course on “Big Data and Information Retrieval” at Westmont College. This is the second time teaching this course and this time we are going to use Amazon Web Services version of Map/Reduce.
This course follows the technical history of Big Data starting with the advent of search engines and eventually growing into the cloud-based big data frameworks that are proliferating today.
One of the fun things we do in this class is to run a search engine optimization contest where each student attempts to get their web page to rise to the top of the search results for a particular term. This year the term is Rapacidious Vetralian. This contest helps them to see how search engines work in practice and what they use for quality indicators.
