Most of the material presented in this lecture is covered by the document Beyond Search Engines: Hyperlink Indexing, which you may wish to look at. If you want to find out more about TREC, go to the TREC website. It will give you a comprehensive overview of the conferences and their aims. Many of the conference proceedings are available to download from this site, but beware - the papers are very technical. The introduction to TREC-1 (Harmann: 1992) should give you a feel for things.
The RUG on-line catalogue is available on the web. Try it out and see how it compares with Altavista. The library at the Katholieke Universiteit Brabant at Tilburg maintains its own page own information retrieval, which is interesting because it includes the role of librarians, certainly the most successful search engines ever.
Using links as indicators of relevance and quality is the subject of a recent Scientific American article, Hypersearching the Web which you may wish to look at. The group which published that also maintains an interesting (but technical) site, IBM Text and Information.