Search Engine and Web Mining Group

Introduction

The Search Engine and Web Mining (SEWM) Group, part of the network lab of Department of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, has a strong research history in the search engine area since the web inception in China. The group plays a leading role in the search engine community. Tianwang search engine is one of the most famous search engines in China since 1997. In particular, the SEWM group has been developing Tianwang for over 9 years.
The group has vigorously technical advantages in incremental crawling, full-text indexing and retrieving, and web archiving. Beginning in 2001, the group started to collect and archive web pages within the scope of China and engineer the Chinese Web Archive - Web Infomall. As of today, Web Infomall has accumulated over 2 billions web pages published in the past years, and stands as the second-largest web archives in the world after the Internet Archive.

Current Projectsi, Full Proposals here(passwd protected)

The SEWM group is undertaking interdisciplinary research topics involving massive network information, computer technology, social science and life science. The active projects are listed as follows:

1. NSFC Grant 60773162: Extraction and Analysis of Entities and Relations (EAER). 01/2008 -- 12/2010
2. 863 Grant 2007AA01Z154 : Ocean Data Information Retrieval (ODIR) . 8/2007 -- 12/2009
3. NSFC Grant 60672171: Discovery on Aviation Safety Information (DASI). 01/2007 -- 12/2009
4. 863 Grant 2006AA01Z196: Platform for Applying, Researching And Developing Intelligent Search Engine (PARADISE). 12/2006 --12/2008
   
5. NSFC Grant 60573166 : WEb Structure and Social Information (WESSI). 01/2006 -- 12/2008
   
6. NSFC Grant 60435020 : Question-and-Answer Information Retrieval (QAIR). 01/2005 -- 12/2008
   
7. MOST Grant 2006BAH02A10 : DIgital Media Content Integration and Distribution (DIMCID). 12/2006 -- 12/2008
8. China National Technology Platform, Grant 2005DKA64001 : Biology Informatics Grid (BIG) . 10/2005 --10/2008
   
9. Microsoft Grant: Information-RICH index (IRICH). 04/2007 -- 04/2008
10. RGC: coming

- Tianwang search engine, http://e.pku.edu.cn
- Chinese Web Archive (Web infomall), http://www.infomall.cn. This achievement received the second place award from the Beijing science and technology advancement in 2004.
- Chinese Digital Assets Library(CDAL).
- The first book on search engine at home - "Search Engine: Principle, Technology and Systems"
- Patent (no. 01109132.0) Method for judging the positional relevance of a group of search key words in a web page.
- Initiated and organized the annual Symposium on Search Engine and Web Mining since 2003.

People and Resources

The SEWM Group led by associate professor Hongfei Yan has four teachers, six PhD students and seven master degree students. Dr. Yan is ever in charge of Tianwang's parallel upgrade and made it become a tens of millions pages search engine from one million pages one. He has also successfully pioneered the deployment of the first large-scale Chinese Web Test collection with 100 GB web pages (CWT100g) and has been continuously organizing annual Workshop on Chinese Web Information Retrieval Evaluation since 2004. Other faculty include Dr. Bo Peng, an expert in large-scale full-text indexing and retrieving, Mr. Zhengmao Xie, an expert in high performance large-scale web page crawling and professor Li Xiaoming in charge of interdisciplinary research on integration of information technology and social science.
Tianwang Search Engine and Web Infomall, consisting of 50 machines, are two daily web service systems maintained by the SEWM group. Additionally, there are many different kinds of open access archives including collections of Chinese web pages, CWT100g, CWT200g, Tianwang query log, Chinese web classification train set, etc.