The evolution of (Web) search

In this talk I will survey over 50 years of Research in algorithms and data structures for searching large collections of textual data. Starting from the classic work about tries (’60), we will make a tour that will show how Research and applications mutually inspired each other leading to the recent results on “semantic” searches. In this tour we will also mention the results achieved by my research group, first in collaboration with Yahoo! (2006-2011), and now in collaboration with Google (2011-).