Introduction to Information Retrieval

See http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs276/cs276-2009-syllabus.html for accompanying course, including problem sets and solutions.

Edit: The solutions require a login. If anyone actually plans on working through these and checking answers, let me know.

This is a great survey book of the material. There aren't too many like it. Once you whet your appetite with this book, you can head off for serious study in one of the key topic areas. If you are lucky your uni will offer a course based on this book.

My only complaints are that I wish it focused a bit less on outdated or old examples. The field has moved incredibly fast, and reading case studies from the mid-90s turned me off.

"I understand this concern on behalf of the taxpayers. People want value for money. That's why we always insist on the principal of Information Retrieval charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and the Information Retrieval procedures used in their interrogations."

Hmm,

So is this an outline of the principles behind something like Xapien and Lucene full indexing libraries?