I’ve been watching Berkeley webcasts for some time now, but I recently noticed that during this past fall, The School of Information Management and Systems had a class on search engines.

On the webcast site, you can watch the talks given by:

• Sergey Brin, Co Founder of Google
• John Battelle, Author of The Search
• Dr. Jan Pederson and Dr. Daniel E. Rose, Yahoo Search
• Dr. Mark Najork, Microsoft Research
• Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo Search

And more.

I found Dr. Najork’s talk real interesting. He spent the majority of his talk covering web spam techniques and which techniques search engines could detect. I’d recommend everyone spending sometime to listen through his talk. He goes through every well-known spam technique and describes ways search engines can train themselves to detect spam. Given enough processing time and a large enough document set, expect the search engines to detect spammy sites.