A number of the general issues relating to efficient access to Internet resources and their effective organization have been of specific concern by those involved with Information Retrieval (IR) for generations. Such issues as browsing, recall and precision, relevance feedback, routing and filtering, information extraction, and effective retrieval are equally as applicable to local or remote database systems, as they are to the overall Internet.

The work of researchers such as Croft, and others, at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is particularly noteworthy for their recognition of the similarity of problems faced in each environment. A recent paper by Croft offers a concise and clear summary of the common desires and challenges (Croft, 1995).

W. Bruce Croft, "What do people want from Information Retrieval", D-Lib magazine..http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november95/11croft.html. (November 1995).