I actually used this as a supplement to Modern Information Retrieval (http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Information-Retrieval-Concepts-...) for my IR class this semester. I found the Stanford book to be much more detailed in terms of the mathematical formalities behind the models/concepts and ended up preferring it.

how does Modern Information Retrieval compare? I've read the intro to IR book, is it worth reading Modern Information Retrieval as well?

MIR seemed to have broader coverage of evaluation metrics for IR systems, better coverage of UI related concerns such as interface design, better coverage of Multimedia retrieval and better coverage of web-search.

I liked intro to IR better for almost everything else. For the size of MIR, the coverage of things like LSI, Clustering and Probabilistic Models seemed shallow in comparison.

"MIR seemed to have broader coverage of evaluation metrics for IR systems"

Thanks, that's enough to make me want to read it :)

This is a good book - I bought a copy 2 years ago. If you use tools like Mahout this book gives a good background on K-means, etc.

I think perhaps the word "Introduction" in the title is a little misleading because the book has good coverage and depth - recommended. Nice that they have it free online.

This is a great book. I've read it a couple of times.