What is Information Retrieval (IR)

IR is the process of searching for and locating textual information in a database based on a user query. Searches can be based on a document's existing metadata, its full text or its content indexing.

The process of locating information system resources that are pertinent to a particular information demand from a collection of those resources in computing and information science. Searches may use full-text indexing or another type of content-based indexing.

The science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describe documents, or searching within databases.

Fully automatic process that responds to a user query by examining a collection of documents and returning a sorted document list that should be relevant to the user requirements as expressed in the query.

The research area that deals with the storage, indexing, organization of, search, and access to information items, typically textual documents. Although its definition includes multimedia retrieval (since information items can be multimedia), the conventional IR refers to the work on textual documents, including retrieval, classification, clustering, filtering, visualization, summarization, and so forth. The research on IR started nearly half century ago and it grew fast in the past 20 years with the efforts of librarians, information experts, researchers on artificial intelligence and other areas. A system for the retrieval of textual data is an IR system, such as all the commercial Web search engines.

The art and science of searching for information in documents for text, sound, images, or data.

A research area about searching for information from various data resources, e.g., the World Wide Web.