'This is the first book that gives you a complete picture of the complications that arise in building a modern web-scale search engine. You'll learn about ranking SVMs, XML, DNS, and LSI. You'll discover the seedy underworld of spam, cloaking, and doorway pages. You'll see how MapReduce and other approaches to parallelism allow us to go beyond megabytes and to efficiently manage petabytes.' Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc. '... this book sets a high standard ...' Natural Language Engineering 'Introduction to Information Retrieval is a comprehensive, authoritative, and well-written overview of the main topics in IR. The book offers a good balance of theory and practice, and is an excellent self-contained introductory text for those new to IR.' Computational Linguistics 'This book provides what Salton and Van Rijsbergen both failed to achieve ... Even more important, unlike some other books in IR, the authors appear to care about making the theory as accessible as possible to the reader, on occasion including short primers to certain topics or choosing to explain difficult concepts using simplified approaches. ... its coverage [is] excellent, the quality of writing high and I was surprised how much I learned from reading it. I think the online resources are impressive.' Natural Language Engineering This is the first book that gives you a complete picture of the complications that arise in building a modern web-scale search engine. You'll learn about ranking SVMs, XML, DNS, and LSI. You'll discover the seedy underworld of spam, cloaking, and doorway pages. You'll see how MapReduce and other approaches to parallelism allow us to go beyond megabytes and to efficiently manage petabytes. Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc. Introduction to Information Retrieval is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and well-written introduction to an increasingly important and rapidly growing area of computer science. Finally, there is a high-quality textbook for an area that was desperately in need of one. Raymond J. Mooney, Professor of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin Through compelling exposition and choice of topics, the authors vividly convey both the fundamental ideas and the rapidly expanding reach of information retrieval as a field. Jon Kleinberg, Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University Highly recommended. H.Levkowitz, Choice Magazine Introduction to Information Retrieval is a comprehensive, authoritative, and well-written overview of the main topics in IR. The book offers a good balance of theory and practice, and is an excellent self-contained introductory text for those new to IR. Olga Vechtomova, Computational Linguistics