Information overload-an IR problem?

Information overload on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a well recognised problem. Research to subdue this problem and extract maximum benefit from the Internet is still in its infancy. With huge amounts of information connected to the Internet, efficient and effective discovery of resources and knowledge has become an imminent research issue. A vast array of network services is growing up around the Internet and a massive amount of information is added everyday. Despite the potential benefits of existing indexing, retrieving and searching techniques in assisting users in the browsing process, little has been done to ensure that the information presented is of a high recall and precision standard. Therefore, search for specific information on this massive and exploding information resource base becomes highly critical. The author discusses the issues involved in resolving the information overload over the WWW and argues that this is solely an information retrieval problem. As a contribution to the field he proposes a general architecture to subdue information overload and describes how this architecture has been instantiated in a functional system he developed.