Information retrieval, the science behind search engines, had its birth in the late 1950s. Its forbearers came from library science, mathematics and linguistics, with later input from computer science. The early work dealt with finding better ways to index text, and then using new algorithms to search these (mostly) automatically built indexes. Like all computer applications, however, the theory and ideas were limited by lack of computer power, and additionally by lack of machine-readable text. But each decade saw progress, and by the 1990s, it had flowered. This monograph tells the story of the early history of information retrieval (up until 2000) in a manner that presents the technical context, the research and the early commercialization efforts.

信息检索是搜索引擎背后的科学，于1950年代后期诞生。它的先驱者来自图书馆学，数学和语言学，后来又来自计算机科学。早期的工作涉及寻找更好的索引文本的方法，然后使用新的算法搜索（主要）自动构建的索引。但是，像所有计算机应用程序一样，由于缺乏计算机功能以及缺乏机器可读的文本，因此理论和思想受到了限制。但是每十年都取得了进展，到1990年代，它开花了。这本专论以介绍技术背景，研究和早期商业化工作的方式讲述了信息检索的早期历史（直到2000年）。