[taurine]

DARPA/IARPA now invests in search 2.0: Instead of asking it to retrieve stored information, you can instruct an agent/search bot to perform tasks for you.

For instance, one should be able to search for: "who is the leader of this IRC hacker group?" "where can heroine be bought on the deep web?" "Is there women trafficking going on behind that log-in wall?" and then an intelligent agent is dispatched, avoiding/crossing roadblocks, like log-in forms, and will eventually bring you the answer.

Coursera has more on the basics, like: https://www.coursera.org/learn/text-retrieval

OpenAI has more on the current happenings of creating more intelligent search bots: https://github.com/openai/universe

Other possible future research areas in information retrieval include being able to search for services ("Where is cheapest taxi service for current location?") and an integration with IOT.