Basic information retrieval techniques are well-known. Since 1990, a range of new query evaluation algorithms and index representations have been developed - including by the presenters of this tutorial - that allow queries to be efficiently resolved on document collections containing terabytes of text. We examine the practical problems of indexing, querying, storing, and updating large text and web databases. We also describe recently-developed techniques for coping with the problems introduced by scale, including fast index construction techniques, novel index representations, and efficient query evaluation strategies.

Justin Zobel completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 1990. He then joined the academic staff of the Department of Computer Science at RMIT, and is now an Associate Professor and a member of the RMIT Multimedia Database Systems group. He has published over 100 refereed papers in the areas of information retrieval, database systems, text databases, data structures, genomics, and compression, is the author of the text "Writing for Computer Science", and is a coauthor of the texts "Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems" and "Document Computing: Technologies for Managing Electronic Document Collections". He is active in the information retrieval community and has served as Chair and Program Committee member for a range of conferences, including ACM SIGIR.