Whenever I read the phrase "Information Retrieval", the first thing that pops into my mind is this scene from Terry Gilliam's "Brazil": http://youtu.be/LFlFIG22Y9E
Ha! Yes! Same here!
I own this book and found it rather disappointing. Somewhat chaotic, with poor treatment of many subjects. Lacks consistency.
For those that might pass by this link without clicking, it's worth noting that it's a paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."
Not a direct alternative, but "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing" by Manning and Schuetze is of significantly higher quality, and explains many of the concepts you will need for information retrieval.
Also, "Speech and Language Processing" by Jurafsky and Martin is an excellent book.
This is a pretty good survey book. It's a little chaotic and I wish the examples given were a bit...better. But it's very good for the price. You'll want to dive deeper with different texts though.