Information retrieval: The early years

Abstract

Information retrieval, the science behind search engines, had its birth in the late 1950s. Its forbearers came from library science, mathematics and linguistics, with later input from computer science. The early work dealt with finding better ways to index text, and then using new algorithms to search these (mostly) automatically built indexes. Like all computer applications, however, the theory and ideas were limited by lack of computer power, and additionally by lack of machine-readable text. But each decade saw progress, and by the 1990s, it had flowered. This monograph tells the story of the early history of information retrieval (up until 2000) in a manner that presents the technical context, the research and the early commercialization efforts.