ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a short introduction to what this book is about and what it does not cover. Here, a number of key concepts are introduced alongside an outline of relevant disciplinary boundaries. Search has become an integral part of everyday life at the same time as it has become more or less invisible to most users. The emergence and market dominance of one actor, Google, has impacted the role of search and thus information in society to such a degree that a re-investigation of the field of study and of search as a phenomenon is called for. Search and searching are in the book initially located as a traditional subject of information science with reference to information retrieval and information behaviour research. While the book starts from these two fields, it also brings in other perspectives from related fields.
