Review of 'Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice' by Croft, Metzler and Strohman

Despite the common public use of Web search engines, their internal design details mostly remain as a black art. The speculation is that there is a significant knowledge gap between what is published by academia and what is guarded behind the doors of large-scale search companies. ''Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice'' is one of the few books that make an attempt to cover issues involved in search engine design and is probably the most comprehensive book published so far on this topic. Unfortunately, the book fails to be a complete search engine guide as its content is dominated by the topics from information retrieval, text processing, and statistics. More precisely, the focus of the book is biased towards the ''search'' rather than the ''engines'' as, in most places, discussions on effectiveness dominate those on efficiency by a great margin. However, the book stands as a very solid IR book.