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Information retrieval built the machine that marketing talks about without reading its manual.

Nine topics from the discipline that decides which documents reach a person at all. Each one has consequences that the marketing consensus never mentions.

On this page

What it is
Information retrieval is the science of finding the document, and today the passage, that answers a need.
The problem until now
Its measures stayed inside the field, so nobody read their own pages the way a retrieval system reads them.
What you can do from here
You can see which passage of yours can be found, scored and taken, and what weakens it.
Information retrieval: a page is split into passages, passages are scored for a query, the ranked list follows
Information retrieval: How the parts depend on each other.
Contents 3

Try this first

Three tests, about ten minutes. They show your pages as a retrieval system sees them.

Tests on this page you have run: 0 of 3. The count stays in this browser only.

Test: Information retrieval

  1. Take one heading of your page that is phrased as a question.
  2. Read only the first sentence under it.
  3. Think: does that sentence answer on its own?

Whether a passage can be taken out and still work.

Test

  1. Search your topic and note the exact words the top results use.
  2. Note what you got, before you open anything else.
  3. Think: which of those words are missing from your page?

The vocabulary a retrieval system counts.

Test

  1. Write down five facts of yours that should be findable.
  2. Search each one with site:example.com and your own domain.
  3. Think: how many were found?

Your own recall, out of five.

Search engines are engineering before they are marketing. The people who optimize search engines are the engineers who build them.

Topics in this field

Learning to rankThe system is trained on the behaviour it caused.Snippet generationIt is written by a machine, from your text, for a query you did not know about.Query expansionYou are answering a question that was quietly edited before it reached you.Relevance feedbackAbsence produces no signal.Query performance predictionA page of ten results looks the same whether the answer exists or not.Passage retrievalYour page is being read in fragments by a system that never sees the whole.Mean average precisionA score of 0.87 tells you how well the ranking matched a list somebody wrote down.Vector space modelIf the web never described your case, the vector for it is somebody else's.Inverted indexThe web is the part of knowledge that somebody bothered to publish and a crawler managed to reach.Precision and recallThe two measures behind every search evaluation, what they cannot see, and who decided what counts as relevant.Latent semantic analysis (LSA)Latent semantic analysis builds meaning from nothing but word counts.Controlled vocabularyA controlled vocabulary fixes which word stands for which concept.

These pages state what each mechanism does, and then the part that matters to anyone who publishes on the web.

A blurred search engine result page
A result page presents a fraction of what exists. The fraction is the product.

The other fields

Everything in this field, on one screen

Each point is a page of information retrieval. Drag, zoom, and click a point to open that page. The whole site is drawn on the knowledge graph.

Information retrieval

See this field inside the whole site →