When we type a query into any search engine these days most of us probably take it for granted that the results we get will be somewhat related to our search term.  Long before the internet existed, the the pioneering work of Karen Sparck Jones was laying foundations for giants like Google and Yahoo to provide their search engines today.

Born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, (England) in 1935 to a Norwegian mother and British father, Karen Sparck Jones FBA sadly died in 2007 at the age of 71. She had a long and distinguished career as a Computer Scientist and held the post of Professor of Computers and Information at Cambridge University until she retired in 2002.

She worked on trailblazing research methods for information retrieval and natural language processing early in her career, and in 1972 she published a paper about inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which is still used by almost all major search engines today.

It was not until late in her life that she achieved recognition for her work. Her awards include ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, BCS Lovelace Medal, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, ACM SIGIR Salton Award, American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Award of Merit.

As “Inside Technology Spectrum” put it in Computer Science: A Woman’s Work.

The woman they honored pioneered techniques that allow people to work with computers using ordinary words instead of equations or codes, a breakthrough that was important in the subsequent development of search engines. According to the ACM, she also discovered term weighting, a statistical method used to evaluate how important any given word is in a set of documents, and thus the word’s significance for an individual document. Search engines use inverse document frequency, as it is known, to help score and rank a document’s importance in response to a user’s query.

Her obituary at The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph are worth a read for further information on this incredible woman.

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This post is my small contribution to Ada Lovelace Day 2010