I haven't been in touch with hardcore academics since around 2 years.
Recently coming across a few IEEE papers on twitter(finding hot trends, ranking tweets, etc), I'm thinking of teaching myself some information retrieval from scratch, but from this standpoint topics like NLP, IR seem quite hard to fathom, or even to begin with in the first place.<p>Any pointers to make the journey smoother, essential foundations? trusted/good books? fun experiments for self learning? IR specific wikis/discussion groups?<p>Thanks in advance.
<i>Managing Gigabytes</i> is one of the more well-known textbooks...<p>Really though - if you want to get started with IR, your best bet is probably to get a job at Google. This is one of those fields where industrial practice is light years beyond academic research, and once you get a job at Google in basically anything, it's relatively easy to transfer to Search and learn how the system works.