So you want to learn natural language processing? It’s a useful conceptual toolkit even if you aren’t coding a search engine. Go check out Jurafsky and Martin’s text, covering much of the material you’d learn as an NLP grad student: https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/
I interviewed someone today who previously was a linguistics grad student doing field work in Oaxaca, Mexico on Zapotec and got into tech because a large company hired her to do NLP work on a fairly well known product and then she taught herself to code. Was a *fascinating* chat.