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. is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 150 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers. It facilitates an average of 28 million trips per day and has facilitated 47 billion trips since its inception in 2010. In 2023, the company had a take rate of 28.7% for mobility services and 18.3% for food delivery.
Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates is a Chilean computer scientist that currently is the Director of Research of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University in the Silicon Valley campus. He is also part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. He is an expert member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee as well as IEEE's Ethics Committee.
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 nine 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 to 2019. Rubin also helped found Essential Products in 2015, a mobile phone start-up that closed in 2020 without finding a buyer. In 2019, Rubin was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame.
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.
Prabhakar Raghavan is a business executive and former researcher of web information retrieval. He 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. 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.
Hummingbird is the codename given to a significant algorithm change in Google Search in 2013. Its name was derived from the speed and accuracy of the hummingbird. The change was announced on September 26, 2013, having already been in use for a month. "Hummingbird" places greater emphasis on natural language queries, considering context and meaning over individual keywords. It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a website, with improved ability to lead users directly to the most appropriate page rather than just a website's homepage.
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.
Arunabh Kumar is an Indian entrepreneur, producer, director, screenwriter, and an actor. He is the founder of streaming platform, The Viral Fever (TVF). His shows are often characterized by parody, lightheartedness, youth oriented, and competitive exams in India.
Thuan Q. Pham is a Vietnamese-American engineer, former chief technology officer (CTO) of Coupang and Uber, and current CTO of Faire.
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 a 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 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 addressing the problem of misinformation on YouTube, providing verifiable and well-sourced information to those seeking it. Google and Wikimedia Enterprise started a partnership in 2021.
Ellen Marie Voorhees is an American computer scientist known for her work in document retrieval, information retrieval, and natural language processing. She works in the retrieval group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
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.
