Welcome to our group!

If you work with search engines, develop or deploy search technology, have a research interest in the field, or if you simply want to learn more about Search, then we will be happy to welcome you to our group!

We bring together industry, academia and end users with interests in web, professional, intranet, enterprise and ecommerce search. Please get in touch with us at irsg@bcs.org.

Udo Kruschwitz, Chair

Call for one day event proposals

The Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the BCS invites proposals for the organisation of one day events supported by BCS. Proposals will be evaluated based on the organisational and financial plans and benefits to the Information Retrieval community.

Read the full submission guidelines

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Become a BCS member and start networking with like-minded professionals in our Information Retrieval specialist group.

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About us

The Information Retrieval specialist group (IRSG) was established in 1978 with the aim of supporting communication between IR researchers and practitioners, promoting the use of IR methods in industry and raising the public awareness of IR-related topics.

Recognising IR as an interdisciplinary field, a further aim of the IRSG is act as a link between computer science, library and information science and also cognate communities (like natural language processing).

Currently the IRSG has over 500 full, voting, members (i.e. professional members of the BCS who are also members of the IRSG) and several hundred affiliate, nonvoting, members.

If you are interested in the development of information retrieval as a research area there are some useful links in the resources section.