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

help for building a whole picture about the field

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

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

Good one

Very clear and to the point about complex concepts

It's worth to learn!

Excellent course

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

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)

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...

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

Very good course, but could have something practical.

perfect course

great introductory course for IR

Good

Surprise!!!

It is an excellent trending topic!

like it.

Very well mounted course.

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

Good suplemental lectures listed.