Information Retrieval: How NIST Helps You Find That Video Online

An open laptop shows a page of cat videos labeled "MY VIDEOS."

By George Awad, a computer scientist in the Information Technology Laboratory at NIST

The need for tools to help everyday users access the information they are looking for on the internet is getting more and more urgent due to the massive amount of data generated every day, hour and minute! This information can be in different formats, such as text (e.g., the latest news or answers to questions), audio (e.g., soundtracks on SoundCloud), images (e.g., pictures for a PowerPoint presentation) and video (e.g., movies, tutorials about how to make or fix stuff, cats).

For example, on YouTube each day about 1 billion hours of video are being watched, and every month more than 2 billion users log onto the service. How can YouTube make those billions of users happy by delivering them the videos they are looking for? This is where a major research field called information retrieval (IR) comes into play.