In 1996 and 1998, a pair of workshops at the University of Glasgow on information retrieval and human–computer interaction sought to address the overlap between these two fields.
Marchionini notes the impact of the World Wide Web and the sudden increase in information literacy – changes that were only embryonic in the late 1990s.
The Workshop on Exploratory Search, initiated by the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab in 2005, alternates between the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) and Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conferences.
This systems are typically evaluated based on their mean average precision over a set of benchmark queries from organizations like the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC).
[5] Other HCIR research, such as Pia Borlund's IIR evaluation model, applies a methodology more reminiscent of HCI, focusing on the characteristics of users, the details of experimental design, etc.
The techniques associated with HCIR emphasize representations of information that use human intelligence to lead the user to relevant results.
These techniques also strive to allow users to explore and digest the dataset without penalty, i.e., without expending unnecessary costs of time, mouse clicks, or context shift.
For example, various web applications employ AJAX to automatically complete query terms and suggest popular searches.
Other kinds of information visualization that allow users access to summary views of search results include tag clouds and treemapping.