Information Retrieval Scientists are Very Good at searching through Unstructured Data, but Very Bad at searching for Structured Data.  Database Researchers had the opposite problem.

IR scientists have developed complex indexing techniques that allow Search Engines to look up the location of documents, just as you might look up a page from the index in a book!

An example of an Information Retrieval Index is shown below:

By contrast, Database Researchers have developed remarkable ways to organize data inside a computer, and database systems are known to be some of the most efficient and scalable computer programs in existence today!

In 1992, David Grossman* decided he would unite these two worlds, by starting work on an IR engine as an application of a database system, later termed SIRE (Scalable Information Retrieval Engine).

He developed a way for Information Retrieval Scientists to store their indexes inside a Database!  This was a very important development, as it allowed researchers to merge the search-effectiveness of IR engines with the scalability of database systems.

An example of an IR index stored in a database is shown below:

Now, for the second phase of our lesson, please proceed on to Internet Mediation.

Last updated: March 06, 2002.