Also, I'd add, at least:
Introduction to Algorithms / Cormen, Leiserson & Rivest (and recently also Stein)
Agreed. It's very much like "Feynman's Lectures" in this way.
There are much better resources for philosophy and Christianity, fundamental \neq best
On the other hand, Knuth has an incredible capacity to read, interpret, understand, and especially apply and expand the contents of research papers -- far beyond the capacity of nearly anyone else.
So if you want to spend a lot of time reading through ACM and IEEE journals, have fun. But you'll understand the research and be able to apply it far better when helped by Knuth.
By the way - the same goes for Graham-Knuth-Patashnik's Concrete Mathematics.
I found Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces to be better.
Retrieving data is a lot different now than what it was back in the 70s and 80s.
The "searching" section of TAoCP is about search algorithms [0]. Some of these (finding by keys, hashing, etc.) are part of what makes a search engine.
Some parts of what make up a search engine aren't related to searching at all, though. PageRank, for example, is about ranking.
I now own the second and latest edition of this volume, but it is now over 20 years old. I recommend all of Knuth's publications.
Is Search and Sorting dated? Well, it is quite old. The fold out chart of tape merging patterns for different tape based sorting algorithms doesn't really come up very often anymore. It's been over 40 years since I've had to write programs that worked with mainframe tape drives.
Although AVL trees are covered well, there is no coverage of red-black trees or splay-trees.
Hashing is covered extensively, but there is no discussion of more modern hash table methods (like Cuckoo Hashing or Robin Hood Hashing or the power of choice results).
Furthermore, the basic hardware model used by Knuth in volume 3 assumes uniform costs for memory access. Cache sensitive algorithms aren't considered in volume 3 but are very important today.
Even quicksort, which I learned by studying Volume 3, now has what I consider to be a more modern treatment in Sedgewick and Wayne's Algorithms, 4th Ed.