From IR to Search, and Beyond

ABSTRACT

It's been nearly 60 years since Vannevar Bush's seminal Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think," portrayed the image of a scholar aided by a machine, "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." Unmistakably in this is the technology now known as search by millions and known as information retrieval (IR) by tens of thousands. From that point in 1945 to now, when some 25 million Web searches an hour are served, a lot has happened.

REFERENCES

• 1: 1. Bush, V. As We May Think." Atlantic Monthly (July 1945); http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/ computer/bushf.htm.
• 2: 2. Licklider, J. C. R. Man-computer symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE-1 (March 1960), 4-11.
• 3: Ramana Rao , Jan O. Pedersen , Marti A. Hearst , Jock D. Mackinlay , Stuart K. Card , Larry Masinter , Per-Kristian Halvorsen , George C. Robertson, Rich interaction in the digital library, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.4, p.29-39, April 1995 [doi>10.1145/205323.205326]
• 4: 4. SearchEngineWatch: see http://searchenginewatch.com/.
• 5: Don R. Swanson, Historical note: information retrieval and the future of an illusion, Readings in information retrieval, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1997

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

General Terms:
Management