DIRS: Disconnected Information Retrieval System

The World Wide Web gives individuals access to huge amounts of data. This includes access to information also found in traditional formats such as news copy. This study addresses a desire to blend these two mediums in such a way that media consumers can move transparently from a hard copy of a given article to an electronic copy. Document retrieval experiments were performed in an attempt to determine the feasibility of implementing a handheld scanning device used to mark traditional newspaper articles for subsequent online retrieval. Several thousand random articles were fetched from two popular news search services to emulate the scanning of print media also available online. Experiments were performed on these articles to quantify the success of searching with various article attributes. Query success is quantified by measuring whether or not the article is found, and how deep into the query results we must parse to locate the correct article. When searching on the title of a news article, it was retrieved correctly 98% of the time with an average depth of one. When searching for an article based on a randomly chosen, 30-character string, 92% of the articles were retrieved successfully with an average depth of two.