Information retrieval (IR) is an area of ​​computing that deals with the storage of documents and the automatic retrieval of information associated with them. Through information retrieval, users have access to representations of the contents of documents existing in databases or documents in all environments that store this content.

It is a research science about searching for information in documents, searching for the documents themselves, searching for metadata that describes documents, and searching in databases, whether relational and isolated or interconnected databases in a hypermedia network, such as the World Wide Web. The media may be available in the form of text, sound, images, or data.

However, there is much confusion between the terms and concepts "data recovery," "document recovery," "information recovery," and "text recovery." In fact, each of these is a special area with its own body of knowledge.