Ferret

Preface

I first became fascinated by information retrieval during my time as a student at the University of Sydney. Back in those days, finding what you wanted on the Web was an art form. I used to have a list of about six or seven search engines that I used every time I had a query and even then I had to page through their results before I found what I was looking for. As the Web exploded it seemed like it was getting harder to find what I was looking for. Then, during my last year at university, I found that more and more I was turning to a single search engine for all my queries and most of the time I didn’t even need to click past the first page of results. A newcomer at the time, Google had gone on to demonstrate, through its success, the importance of accurate information retrieval on the Web.

Around that time I was writing a statistical based natural language parser for my honors thesis, so I was no stranger to large-scale text processing. After a few years working as an IT consultant, I was really keen to get back to work on something algorithmically interesting. In 2004, I had left the corporate life to go and train in Judo at the Kodokan in Japan, and I found myself with a little spare time on my hands. I also had a new-found interest in the Ruby programming language, which was perfect for most of the little side projects I was working on except for one thing: it was missing a good information retrieval library. This was the perfect project for me to learn Ruby and to get ...