Economic impact assessment of NIST's text REtrieval conference (TREC) program. Final report

Abstract

Information retrieval (IR) is the science and practice of matching information seekers with the information they seek. Internet users depend on IR tools each time they use a web search engine, such as those built by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. However, a much larger IR industry exists that has improved the process of finding information within a single computer (“desktop search”) or set of computers (“enterprise search”), as well as within large databases, such as library catalogs (“database search”). Further, IR techniques have been used to identify key links within, for example, legal records, genomics data, and spam.