Retrieval

Information retrieval/search

This refers to the process of searching for information. Information can be held either on a database, the Internet, metadata about a document or inside a document.  There are several different ways of searching for information, for example, using the Google search engine on the web.

There are many different terms used to describe this process: data retrieval, text retrieval and information retrieval. These may sound similar and there are times when they do overlap with each other; however, they each have their own theoretical background and appropriate technology.



This is another multidisciplinary area which draws upon a wide variety of sources which include linguistics, statistics, information architecture and computer science.

Search engines are another tool designed to look for information on the Internet. They store information about numerous web pages and retrieve these pages by means of a ‘spider’ (or Web crawler) – an automated web browser which follows every link it can see on a web page.

The search engine uses a set of algorithms which help index the page and determine its position in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).  The user is then shown a list of these results or ‘rankings’ which relate to their initial query.