Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.
Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the very first system to use the now popular vector space model for Information Retrieval.
Uber Technologies, Inc., commonly referred to as Uber, provides ride-hailing services, food delivery, and freight transport. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities worldwide. The company has over 131 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers worldwide and facilitates an average of 25 million trips per day. It has facilitated 42 billion trips since its inception in 2010 and is the largest ridesharing company in the United States.
Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in creating and promoting the Android operating system for mobile phones and other devices during most of his tenure. Rubin left Google in 2014 after allegations of sexual misconduct, although it was presented as a voluntary departure rather than a dismissal at first. Rubin then served as co-founder and CEO of venture capital firm Playground Global from 2015–2019. Rubin also helped found Essential Products in 2015, a mobile phone start-up that closed in 2020 without finding a buyer.
Ranking of query is one of the fundamental problems in information retrieval (IR), the scientific/engineering discipline behind search engines. Given a query q and a collection D of documents that match the query, the problem is to rank, that is, sort, the documents in D according to some criterion so that the "best" results appear early in the result list displayed to the user. Ranking in terms of information retrieval is an important concept in computer science and is used in many different applications such as search engine queries and recommender systems. A majority of search engines use ranking algorithms to provide users with accurate and relevant results.
Gopal Balakrishnan was a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until he was fired due to allegations of sexual assault.
A content farm or content mill is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers or uses automated tools to generate a large amount of textual web content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by search engines, known as SEO. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views, as first exposed in the context of social spam.
Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice president at Google, where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. His research spans algorithms, web search and databases and he is the co-author of the textbooks Randomized Algorithms with Rajeev Motwani and Introduction to Information Retrieval.
Travis Cordell Kalanick is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Uber. Previously he worked for Scour, a peer-to-peer file sharing application company, and was the co-founder of Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery network that was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007.
Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2023, with over eight billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.
This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.
Thuan Pham is a Vietnamese-American engineer, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Coupang and former CTO of Uber.
Susan Joy Fowler Rigetti is an American writer and was a software engineer known for her role in influencing institutional changes in how Uber and Silicon Valley companies treat sexual harassment. Her business celebrity led to book and Hollywood film deals based on her experience.
The 2017–18 United States political sexual scandals saw a heightened period of allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault, and resulted in the subsequent firings and resignations of American politicians. Some of the allegations are linked to the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases starting in October 2017 amid the wider MeToo movement.
Amit Kumar is Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He received his B.Tech. degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1997, and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2002. He worked as Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, U.S. during 2002–2003. He joined IIT Delhi as faculty member in 2003. He works in the area of combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms and online algorithms. He is working extensively on problems arising in scheduling theory, clustering, and graph theoretic algorithmic problems.
The relationship between Google and Wikipedia was originally collaborative in Wikipedia's early days, when Google helped reduce the pagerank of widespread, uneditable Wikipedia clones that were ostensibly ad farms. In 2007, Google introduced Knol, a direct competitor for community-driven encyclopedia creation, which was subsequently shut down in 2012. Google later supported Wikimedia with numerous grants, and came to rely on Wikipedia for solving the problem of spreading misinformation on YouTube, providing verifiable and well-sourced information to those seeking it. Google and Wikimedia Enterprise started a partnership in 2021.
Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology. Previously, she was a director of Machine Learning research at NVIDIA. Her research considers tensor-algebraic methods, deep learning and non-convex problems.
Niniane Wang is an American software engineer and technology executive. In her early career at Google, Wang co-created Google Desktop and created Google Lively. She was previously vice president of engineering of Niantic after her company Evertoon was acquired by Niantic in 2017.
Uber, officially Uber Technologies Inc., has been the subject of controversies. Like other ridesharing companies, the company classifies its drivers as gig workers/independent contractors. This has become the subject of legal action in several jurisdictions. The company has disrupted taxicab businesses and allegedly caused an increase in traffic congestion. Ridesharing companies are regulated in many jurisdictions and the Uber platform is not available in several countries where the company is not able or willing to comply with local regulations. Other controversies involving Uber include various unethical practices such as aggressive lobbying and ignoring and evading local regulations. Many of these were revealed by a leak of documents showing controversial activity between 2013 and 2017 under the leadership of Travis Kalanick.
