Learner Reviews & Feedback for Text Retrieval and Search Engines by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Although I was very enthusiastic at the beginning of this course, my enthusiasm was soon replaced by disappointment. There were several reasons for my disappointment: First, it is very difficult to understand Prof. ChengXiang Zhai. This is aggravated by the fact that the subtitles of his videos have not been edited and many of these subtitles do not really make any sense. Furthermore, some of the quizzes check on material that is only covered in the week after the quiz. Second, and more importantly, I was disappointed by the explanations offered by Prof. Zhai. Often, he just drops some technical terms without giving any explanation whatsoever. An example in point is his covering of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. He just dropped the name but did not offer any definition or explanation. Unfortunately, there were many more topics that were only covered in such a name dropping way. In the end, I bought myself the book by Stefan Büttcher and the book by Christopher Manning. These are excellent books that were also recommended by Prof. Zhai. For anybody interested in information retrieval I would actually recommend to go directly to these books instead of taking this course.

Class is not updated, so the programming assignments no longer work without a lot of effort. Without the programming assignments, the class is too theoretical, we need more real world use.

Literally this is a dead course. No one is active from course to assist students. You can't complete assignment 1 if you are not good with c++ and STL 'PERIOD'.

Giving up this course

This is not a class I would normally pursue. I took it as part of the "Data Mining" certification. That being said, this class was wonderful. I learned the basics of text retrieval and search engines. I went from knowing nothing, to having a working sense of how search engine algorithms work. It was a challenging course for me, but very much worth the time and effort I put into it. It was like pulling back the curtain on the code behind Google, Netflix, and Amazon searches, and that has made me think of the world in a different way. I am now a human happily collaborating with machine learning systems. Thank you!!

Excellent ! Well organized, presented with aptitude to detail. Definitely will recommend and take further units in this specialization.

Thanks Prof

不得不说， 老师讲课讲得的很好，内容丰富，逻辑性很强，非常清晰。这一点很难得，因为我听过太多天马行空的课了。

但是Honor Track 有着灾难性的问题。因为当前的作业源代码已经和最新的ＭＥＴＡ　不再兼容了，　作业源代码版本太旧。运气不好的话，学生要花巨量的时间来安装调试，　处理各种ｄｅｐｅｎｄｅｎｃｙ　的问题，　而这些根本不是学这门课所要做的。看看ｄｉｓｃｕｓｓｉｏｎ　ｆｏｒｕｍ　里吧，哀鸿遍野。另外，在平常的作业里会有些低级错误，　连Ｍｅｎｔｏｒ　都无法自圆其说。希望能够及时纠正这些错误，不然真的可惜了这么好的内容。　本来要给五星的，两颗星就扣在这些地方。

Overall, a very good introductory course. It is doorway to explore TR systems further and this course gives you a good understanding of lay of the Information Retrieval land.

Couple of tests during the entire course need you to read ahead the next week's course and even though the issue has been reported more than 2 years ago, as of this writing, they have not been fixed

This is an interesting course that dives into the fundamentals (and thus mathematical functions and similar) of text retrieval. This is highly technical and essential if you need to develop your own system, though could be too deep if you just need to understand the basic idea behind.

Sir is Amazing. Reviews saying this course lacks practicals are true. Fact is, you will be able to implement them on your own, as sir explained concepts pretty well. This is by far one of the best courses on coursera, comparable to Mr. Ng's course on ML and DL

Excellent course. The only request I would have is to make honors programming assignment technology independent (I would have wanted to do it in R) and to add feedback on incorrect answers in quizzes so you can learn more easily from your istakes.

The novelty of this course is that it not only introduces algorithms, like many other courses, but also focuses on system design issues. You can find algorithms everywhere, but it's not easy to know the system design.

Great course for those trying to understand how ro analyse and process text data. It has the right amount of tools to help you understand the basics of information retrieval and search engines.

A great overview of text retrieval methods. Good coverage of search engines. A longer course will cover search engine better (remember this is a 6 weeker)

Very well mounted course.

For the majority of the topics explained, focused on techniques, not jut on theory.

Good suplemental lectures listed.

Interesting content

However the prof/instructor should practice not pausing so much when explaining the concepts/contents

This course is complemented with a software and text (not mandatory) and good explanation with diagrams...

This advance course just perfect for me who know little bit about advance statistic and linear algebra.

Very clear, make me have a basic understanding of data mining and data retrieval. Thanks very much.

One of the best courses I have taken on Coursera. Really liked how the quizzes were structured!

Arguably the best resource for learning about key concepts of text retrieval online.

Excellent course, learned a lot that i am already applying to my professional work.

This was just the course I needed! Great introduction to the Information Retrieval!

Love the way the professor introduces the concepts, doesn't overwhelm the student!

Excellent Introduction to Text Retrieval and Search Engines technologies.

very good course! teach not only knowledge but also how to do research!