Design of new indexing techniques

Information Retrieval [IR] is the science of searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching relational databases and the World Wide Web. There is overlap in the usage of the terms data retrieval, document retrieval, information retrieval, and text retrieval, but each also has its own body of literature, theory, and technologies. IR is interdisciplinary, based on computer science, mathematics, library science, information science, information architecture, cognitive psychology, linguistics, statistics, and physics. A document either matches or does not match a query. In the case of large document collections, the resulting number of matching documents can far exceed the number a human user could possibly sift through. Accordingly, it is essential for a search engine to rank-order the documents matching a query. To do this, the search engine computes, for each matching document, a score with respect to the query at hand.