Three decades of web search, how goes the retrieval revolution?

This year marks the 30th anniversary of web search engines and the 25th anniversary of Google being launched as a company.I will use this moment to both reflect on aspects of the information retrieval landscape and also look forward at ideas that I think our community has not examined in sufficient detail.Looking back, while it's clear that Web search has precipitated a revolution in information access, it is worth asking, what did web search revolt against?I will reflect on the way the information access was facilitated in the past.Next, I will examine what I think are some of the issues in information seeking going forward with a particular focus on the gaps in understanding.Here I will talk about some of the new research that we've been conducting at our RMIT university with a particular focus on the importance of conversational search and query variability.