The Information Retrieval Problem

Stated succinctly, the information retrieval problem is:

Given a set of documents and a query, find the set of documents relavent to the query.

Related failures include:

• insufficient precision: finding too much "junk." Including all items in a result set gives perfect recall at the cost of poor precision.
• insufficient recall: failing to find the relavent resources. An empty result set has infinite precision, but zero recall.