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.

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

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

It is a great course, highly recommended for those who wants to work in the AI

help for building a whole picture about the field

very very good

Itś a geat course, and the teacher shared his knowlege

Prof Zhai explains very clearly each models with their pros & cons.

Very good course for someone who wants to understand how text retrieval works.

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.

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

Thanks Prof

Excellent course

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

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.

Very clear and to the point about complex concepts

It's worth to learn!

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

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

Very interesting!

A well put together course, very rigorous and in-depth...

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.

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

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)

thanks

Good Course