A 2010 study estimated that "without TREC, U.S. Internet users would have spent up to 3.15 billion additional hours using web search engines between 1999 and 2009.

"[1] Hal Varian the Chief Economist at Google wrote that "The TREC data revitalized research on information retrieval.

Having a standard, widely available, and carefully constructed set of data laid the groundwork for further innovation in this field.

"[2] Each track has a challenge wherein NIST provides participating groups with data sets and test problems.

After evaluation of the results, a workshop provides a place for participants to collect together thoughts and ideas and present current and future research work.Text Retrieval Conference started in 1992, funded by DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Project) and run by NIST.

Retrieval using an ‘ad hoc’ query and retrieval using a ‘routing' query In TREC-3 a small group experiments worked with Spanish language collection and others dealt with interactive query formulation in multiple databases TREC-4 they made even shorter to investigate the problems with very short user statements TREC-5 includes both short and long versions of the topics with the goal of carrying out deeper investigation into which types of techniques work well on various lengths of topics In TREC-6 Three new tracks speech, cross language, high precision information retrieval were introduced.

Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) started in 2008 with the aim of building a South Asian counterpart for TREC, CLEF, and NTCIR, NIST claims that within the first six years of the workshops, the effectiveness of retrieval systems approximately doubled.

[7] The conference was also the first to hold large-scale evaluations of non-English documents, speech, video and retrieval across languages.

An independent report by RTII found that "about one-third of the improvement in web search engines from 1999 to 2009 is attributable to TREC.

... Additionally, the report showed that for every $1 that NIST and its partners invested in TREC, at least $3.35 to $5.07 in benefits were accrued to U.S. information retrieval researchers in both the private sector and academia."