A Study of Similarity Functions Used in Textual Information Retrieval in Wide Area Networks

World Wide Web is a rich source of information. It continues to expand in size and complexity with the increasing use of the internet and social media but how to retrieve relevant documents on the Web is becoming a challenge. In this paper there is discussion about the goals, challenges and importance of similarity functions in information retrieval in wide area networks. This paper discusses the different similarity functions that are used by various authors as information retrieval techniques to measure the similarity of document with the query in the field of information retrieval in wide area networks. Keywords— Similarity Function, Textual Information Retrieval, Wide Area Networks