The Impact of the Web on Information Retrieval

Abstract

of physical servers [Berners-Lee 1989]. At the time, his proposal went further than others in considering not only information resources (documents) as part of this graph but also non-information resources, that is, abstract concepts and entities of all kinds, in what would be later termed the Semantic Web. Further, while this information space was primarily intended to be explored by human navigation as was the case with hypertext implementations of the past, Berners-Lee did foresee the opportunity for the automated analysis of the Web graph. As it turns out, his key ideas, the representation of information as a graph, adding a semantic layer to information, and the potential for automated analysis of these structures would come to revolutionize an entire subfield of computer science, the field of information retrieval (IR). In this chapter, we trace the impact of Berners-Lee’s ideas on the development of IR, both within the academic field and its applications in industry, particularly web search engines. Indeed, today, web search engines are tools that are a crucial component of our daily lives. In Section 7.2, we will first look at how Berners-Lee’s ideas of structuring the Web brought about a set of challenges and opportunities that reinvigorated the field of IR and led to the emergence of web search, both in academia and industry. In Section 7.3, we will consider how Berners-Lee’s ideas around the extension of the hypertext Web to a Semantic Web and its implementation in technical standards at the W3C provided further new opportunities for developing semantic search engines with capabilities well beyond what was possible using the techniques of the past. Last, in Section 7.4, we will consider some of The Impact of the Web on Information Retrieval