Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics

Easily the best introduction to the field of IR. Its hallmarks are: 1. very readable (concepts presented in layman terms) and directly applicable (you can literally read and apply the concepts in the real world) 2. excellent survey of the field with an comprehensive compedium of references for further reading (surveys, topical and detailed references) 3. the only book with latest information on IR strategies and utilities - so far (May 2008) For the learnings you will get out of this book - it is a real BARGAIN. You could easily spend hours and hours of your time just trying to figure out what to read. Its a gem. Its not expensive. Buy it->implement it->realize success from it! buy it now :). <br /> <br />To improve your understanding from a novice level to an intermediatre level, would recommend the following books: <br />A. Introduction 1st book: Information Retrieval (this book) David Grossman and Ophir Frieder <br />B. Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates (more technical and deeper) <br />C. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images by by Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell (best for implementing and a decent overview) <br />D. Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran (algos/pseudo-code, good utilities and concise summaries) <br />F. Mining the web, by Chakrabarti (excellent intro the field of web mining, with some excellent chapters on IR) <br />G. Books by Salton (vector models and fuzzy sets) <br />H. IR book by C. J. Rijsbergen (probabilistic models; available online for free) <br />I. the book by Lesk et. al. <br />J. Follow-up by reading a ton of papers available on citeseer or via google <br /> <br />Good luck!

This book provides an excellent blend of theoretical and practical knowledge of the IR field, particularly for those of us with a computer science background, yet no practical working experience in IR. In my opinion, the math is an essential part of expressing the concepts more formally, so it was refreshing to see the authors incorporate just enough formulae, but no more. This book is not going to provide you with a set of recipes for building an indexing or search engine, nor would I expect it do so. However, it does give you an idea of how such engines might be built. Further, I found this book to be a necessary prerequisite for other practitioner-oriented texts, such as Lucene in Action (In Action series). Anyone delving into this field for the first time and attempting to use libraries like Lucene may find it difficult to fully exploit its capabilities without a firm understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of IR.

The Second Edition of "Information Retrieval", by Grossman and Frieder is one of the best books you can find as a introductory guide to the field, being well fit for a undergraduate or graduate course on the topic. It is somewhat a parallel to "Modern Information Retrieval", by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto. Chapter 2, "Retrieval Strategies", make a very good review of the main information retrieval models. The main characteristic of this chapter is that it also give some introduction to the theory needed to understand the models. In this chapter, the authors take care to provide not only equations, but also examples of how these equations work in small sets of documents, making it easier for student to grasp their workings. It is a long and detailed chapter, maybe the best you can find among the field. Chapters 3 to 8, make a broad review of IR techniques, however they do not go deep in any technique. The best part is that they have pointers to all the techniques discussed. Those chapters, are actually broad surveys of the title chapter topic.

Information Retrieval is a textbook for computer science students and a reference book for IR practitioners. The References section is an excellent starting point for conducting literature research. The best features of the book are its readability -reviewed by students and IR scientists- and the authors' willingness to provide step-by-step hands-on examples and plenty of graphics. The authors' transparency with how-to calculations encourages readers to learn by doing. This book is recommended for IR practitioners, computer science departments and technical libraries. It is also recommended for search engine optimization specialists and web developers that need to incorporate search technology, ranking algorithms and heuristics into their projects.

If you're working in the IR industry, or want to develop software in this field, this book is a great starting point. A clarification: this will is not a book for researchers -- instead think of it as a book for advanced practitioners or engineers needing to work in this area. Inside you'll see complete worked examples of several fundamental computations rather than detailed proofs.