All Information Retrieval Systems

Information Retrieval Systems groups the computing pioneers in this atlas whose central, explicitly stated contribution concerns finding, ranking, and returning relevant material from large text or document collections. Members range from the researcher widely credited as the leading figure in information retrieval during the mid-twentieth century, through the builders of early experimental retrieval systems, search relevance and ranking research, and the founders of the first practical internet search engines that located material across distributed archives before dedicated commercial search engines existed. A pioneer belongs here when the cited work is about ranking or locating existing documents, not about mining new patterns out of a dataset.