Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto's Modern Information Retrieval is considered the standard for Information Retrieval courses at Universites like Berkley, U Mass & Stanford. The book is surprisingly easy to read, even if some sections seem a little over my head.

A small portion of the book is available online from Berkley's website. There are some excellent passages on subjects like user interfaces and visualization, which discusses the GUI of web search, and a great list of resources on web search. You can even download the teaching material slides for much of the book - an excellent way to become more familiar with the science of web search.

Lastly, a terrific glossary on the site helps to make the reading less painful, and can even be informative on its own.

I realize that I've been devoting a significant portion of the SEOmoz blog to IR studies and research. I'll make a concerted effort to spend next week on more general SEO topics.