Search user interfaces are at the centre of interactive information seeking and retrieval. Yes, search user interfaces include the jobs that the quotation above enumerates and even more. While this book is not only about interfaces, it is also about those jobs and even more about that more.

This book reports on the recent advances on interaction topics reflected in its title. However, the historic roots of these topics go deep – and like all roots they are entangled and not that visible. But we can learn from them in terms of problems addressed and solutions attempted. Research on information-seeking behaviour, under various names and orientations, goes back many decades. So let us start with a bit of general history of the topics covered by the book; more specific history is presented in Chapter 1.

Activities associated with what we now call information retrieval existed and were practised long before Calvin Mooers (1919–1994, physicist and information retrieval pioneer) coined the term information retrieval in 1951. They were rooted in libraries but left them to become part of technology.

Mooers (1951) defined information retrieval as follows:

Not surprisingly, interaction is not mentioned in this definition – at the time the concept and term (in its present denotation and connotation) did not exist, even though interaction was practised from the start using ‘whatever systems, techniques, or machines’ were available. Even ‘intellectual aspects … for search’ imply interaction. As it turned out, the ‘systems, techniques or machines’ on the one hand and ‘intellectual aspects’ on the other became two major branches of problem orientation and inspiration for information retrieval research and practice.