What Do People Want From IR by B. Croft

With the advent of the World-Wide Web and the huge increase in the use of the Internet, there has been a corresponding increase in demand for text retrieval systems that can work in distributed, wide-area network environments. This demand also comes from groupware applications such as Lotus Notes, which facilitate the rapid creation of databases distributed throughout an organization. One problem of this type is addressed by Web search engines, such as Infoseek and Lycos, which index Web pages and provide access to them. The more general problems are locating the best databases to search in a distributed environment that may contain hundreds or even thousands of databases, and merging the results that come back from the distributed search. The results must be merged in order to produce the overall ranking of retrieved items, instead of a collection of individual rankings.