Information retrieval programs on the Internet: tools for teaching IR

The theory of information retrieval has generally been taught in theory: it has been difficult to provide students with hands-on experience with retrieval engines incorporating many IR topics such as relevance ranking, fuzzy queries, etc. Recently, however, a number of retrieval programs have become freely available for interactive use over the Internet. These programs can be useful in the classroom, by permitting students to examine a variety of implementations of IR algorithms over different document collections. Moreover, many of the document collections are in themselves valuable subject resources, and are well worth exploring from the point of view of development familiarity with them as reference materials