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 document contents that exist in databases or documents in all environments that store these contents.

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

There is, however, much confusion among the terms and concepts “data retrieval,” “document retrieval,” “information retrieval,” and “text retrieval.” In fact, each of these is a special area that has its own body of knowledge