General applications of information retrieval

• Digital libraries
• Information filtering
  • Recommender systems
• Media search
  • Blog search
  • Image retrieval
    Image retrieval
    An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captioning, keywords, or descriptions to the images so that...
    
    
  • Music retrieval
    Music information retrieval
    Music information retrieval is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications...
    
    
  • News search
  • Speech retrieval
  • Video retrieval
• Search engines
  • Desktop search
    Desktop search
    Desktop search is the name for the field of search tools which search the contents of a user's own computer files, rather than searching the Internet...
    
    
  • Enterprise search
    Enterprise search
    Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience.-Enterprise search summary:...
    
    
  • Federated search
    Federated search
    Federated search is an information retrieval technology that allows the simultaneous search of multiple searchable resources. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the search engines participating in the federation...
    
    
  • Mobile search
    Mobile Search
    Mobile search is an evolving branch of information retrieval services that is centered around the convergence of mobile platforms and mobile phones and other mobile devices. Web search engine ability in a mobile form allows users to find mobile content on websites which are available to mobile...
    
    
  • Social search
    Social search
    Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the search query...
    
    
  • Web search
    Web search engine
    A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...
    
    

Domain specific applications of information retrieval

• Expert search finding
• Genomic information retrieval
• Geographic information retrieval
  Geographic Information Retrieval
  Geographic information retrieval or geographical information retrieval is the augmentation of information retrieval with geographic metadata.Information retrieval generally views documents as a collection or `bag' of words...
  
  
• Information retrieval for chemical structures
• Information retrieval in software engineering
  Software engineering
  Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
  
  
• Legal information retrieval
  Legal information retrieval
  Legal information retrieval is the science of information retrieval applied to legal text, including legislation, case law, and scholarly works. Accurate legal information retrieval is important to provide access to the law to laymen and legal professionals...
  
  
• Vertical search
  Vertical search
  A vertical search engine, as distinct from a general web search engine, focuses on a specific segment of online content. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, the automotive industry, legal information, medical...
  
  

Other retrieval methods

• Adversarial information retrieval
  Adversarial information retrieval
  Adversarial information retrieval is a topic in information retrieval related to strategies for working with a data source where some portion of it has been manipulated maliciously. Tasks can include gathering, indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from such a data source...
  
  
• Automatic summarization
  Automatic summarization
  Automatic summarization is the creation of a shortened version of a text by a computer program. The product of this procedure still contains the most important points of the original text....
  
  
  • Multi-document summarization
    Multi-document summarization
    Multi-document summarization is an automatic procedure aimed at extraction of information from multiple texts written about the same topic. Resulting summary report allows individual users, so as professional information consumers, to quickly familiarize themselves with information contained in a...
    
    
• Compound term processing
  Compound term processing
  Compound term processing is the name that is used for a category of techniques in Information retrieval applications that performs matching on the basis of compound terms...
  
  
• Cross-lingual retrieval
  Cross-language information retrieval
  Cross-language information retrieval is a subfield of information retrieval dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user's query. For example, a user may pose their query in English but retrieve relevant documents written in French.The first...
  
  
• Document classification
  Document classification
  Document classification or document categorization is a problem in both library science, information science and computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. This may be done "manually" or algorithmically...
  
  
• Spam filtering
• Question answering
  Question answering
  In information retrieval and natural language processing , question answering is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language...