Information Retrieval (study) resources

If you're looking for a way of getting to know the background of IR, there's a plethora of options (online) available. From the classic book by Keith van Rijsbergen (1979), the upcoming IR book by Manning and Schuetze (who previously wrote the classic "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing") to various lecture pages of IR courses taught around the world. For example, David Carmel's course page at Haifa, James Allen's course page at UMass, Jamie Callan's course page at CMU, or ofcourse the course taught by Maarten de Rijke (which is more general and centered around "internet information").

Lectures on "Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business"

This lecture series on search ran at UC Berkeley in fall 2005. Although some of the material may already be out of date and generally doesn't go very deep, it's still a good (broad) overview of topics related to search and provides insights from different perspectives. They got some people from industry and the videos of the lectures are good quality.

Here's the course schedule with links to individual lectures: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is141/f05/schedule.html