Ask HN: Books about full text search?

At a general audience level, "Index" is on my list to read. It covers the invention of the index up to digital search engines. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/books/review-index-histor...

"Introduction to Information Retrieval" is a textbook which is available online https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/ Here's a review: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/book-review-introduction...

Another textbook which IMHO is a bit lower level is "Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines". The book website is down for me right now, but you can find it on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Information-Retrieval-Implementing-Ev...

Another commenter linked to "Relevant Search", which is great if you want to learn how to effectively use a search engine to improve relevance (as opposed to how to implement a search engine). It's old, but another book in that vein that was really helpful for me earlier in my career is Lucene in Action: https://www.amazon.com/Lucene-Action-Second-Covers-Apache/dp...

Re: Ask HN: Books about full text search?

#5

Post by arooaroo » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

fiedzia wrote: post #3

https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search Also "taming text"

Manning also have a book on Lucene, the library that powers Solr and ElasticSearch. IIRC the book covered how Lucene actually works under-the-good and would therefore act as a good reference on the subject in general.

Re: Ask HN: Books about full text search?

#6

Post by francoisprunier » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 7:30 PM UTC

Not a book, but this paper from 2019 covers a lot of ground and reviews the different topics extensively: https://tonellotto.github.io/publication/fntir/fntir_main.pd...

Re: Ask HN: Books about full text search?

#7

Post by ssn » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

Three reference textbooks are available openly:

* Introduction to Information Retrieval, http://informationretrieval.org/

* Information Retrieval in Practice, http://www.search-engines-book.com/

* Entity-Oriented Search, https://eos-book.org/

Modern Information Retrieval is also a classic reference. Not openly available but some contents are (were?) available online. Their site seems to be down but the Internet Archive has a copy.

Additional resources here:

* https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval.html http://web.archive.org/web/20220708135205/http://grupoweb.up...

Re: Ask HN: Books about full text search?

#8

Post by pixelmonkey » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 7:46 PM UTC

Take a look at my post “Lucene: The Good Parts”—

https://blog.parse.ly/lucene/

The book mentioned there is Lucene in Action.

And then this YouTube presentation by a Lucene/Elasticsearch committer will give you a nice overview of some related algorithms—

https://youtu.be/eQ-rXP-D80U

Re: Ask HN: Books about full text search?

#9

Post by tgv » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

Check the literature of open courses on Text Retrieval. E.g. https://stanford.edu/class/cs276/

Re: Ask HN: Books about full text search?

#10

Post by vdfs » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 8:28 PM UTC

Lucene in Action, good introduction to Lucene, which can be helpful to learn ElasticSearch (most used FTS these days)