Modern Information Retrieval: The Concepts and Technology Behind Search (ACM Press Books) 2nd (second) Edition by Baeza-Yates, Dr Ricardo, Ribeiro-Neto, Dr Berthier published by Addison Wesley
Discusses the changes in modern information retrieval and the provision of relevant information with minimal noise. Softcover. Information storage and retrieval systems.
I usually don't shy away from touching old IT books, as I prefer a conceptually good old book to a messy one that is technologically up-to-date. This book from 1999 is somewhere between these two poles. If you're already a bit familiar with full-text indexing and search technologies like Lucene and Solr, you'll find some theoretical background in the first chapters of this book - and learn that Lucene didn't invent TF/IDF scoring. The later chapters are a rather mixed bag, some treating their topic in a cursory way, some others getting a bit lost while digging too deep. The two main authors promise in the preface that in spite of the book having a bunch of chapter contributors, it is not a compilation of essays, but a monography. Well, stylistically that is true, but the erratic treatment of topics like multimedia retrieval, Web search and digital libraries proves them wrong. Overall it is a book worth looking at, if you're interested in the fundamental concepts of information retrieval, but you could skip or least just skim through the second half. To end on a marginal note: It is certainly kind of amusing to read a book where Yahoo is treated as the greatest world wide web search engine, where Altavista exists and where Google is only mentioned very briefly. The times they are a-changin'.