Welcome to SEOmoz blog readers and SES NYC participants who may have seen me speak at the Search Algorithms session. You've reached the right page - congrats!

The following is a list of useful resources for where to find information about patent applications, research that may affect search engine technology and algorithms and general data on the function of modern information retrieval engines in the commercial space. If you have any suggestions or more to add, please do contribute in the comments below. Thanks!

Patents & Patent Applications

• US Patent Office - Issued Patents & Published Applications Database
• European Patent Office - Patent Information on the Web

Specific Patent Applications & Research Reviewed

• Google's Patent Application - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data
• Patent Applications Covered at SEObytheSea (25+)
• Google Patent: Personalization of Placed Content Ordering in Search Results at SocialPatterns
• Keeping up with Search Engine Patents from SEW (oldie - 2001, but still a goodie)

University Research Publications

• MIT - Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• University of Washington - Information School
• Stanford University - Center for the Study of Language & Information
• Illinois Institute of Technology - Information Retrieval Laboratory
• University of Massachusetts - Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval

IR & SEO Blogs Covering Search Algorithms

• Searchtools - Blog & Site
• Miislita - Dr. Edel Garcia
• SearchEngineWatch Blog
• Search Science - Xan Porter
• SEO by the Sea - Bill Slawski
• SERoundtable - Barry Schwartz
• SEOmoz - Yours Truly

IR Conferences & Sites

• Semantic Technology Conference
• SIGIR: Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval
• Search Engine Meeting from Infonortics
• Text REtrieval Conference - TREC
• Intro to IR online course from Stanford

Books

• Ricardo Baeza-Yates & Berthier Ribeiro-Neto - Modern Information Retrieval
• Information Retrieval by C.J. van Rijsbergen
• Good list of (relatively) recent books from Michael Beigbeder
• IR Books for review at the University of Washington