Michael Lesk adopts Shakespeare's theory of the seven ages of the human being starting from infancy to senility to predict the evolution of information retrieval from 1945 to 2010. In this article, Lesk sought to compare two approaches to information retrieval. The first approach is intellectual analysis by man and machine: artificial intelligence introduced by Vannevar Bush. The second approach is a simple exhaustive elaboration: statistical details introduced by Warren Weaver. The article was written in 1995, when the Internet and World Wide Web technology were still growing. I have identified three important elements to elaborate in this essay regarding the evolution of information retrieval. Important Element 1: Statistical detail vs AI approaches The first IR system using indices and concordances was built. When the first large-scale information systems were developed, computers could search indexes much better than humans, which required more detailed indexing. However, indexing could also become too expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the idea of ​​free text search is initiated, which eliminates the need for manual indexing. Objections pointed out that selecting the right words may not be the correct label for a given topic. One solution is official vocabularies. The idea of ​​recall and precision also emerged as methods for evaluating information retrieval systems, and they demonstrated that free text indexing was as effective as manual indexing and much cheaper. New information retrieval techniques such as relevance feedback and multilingual retrieval have been invented. The 1960s also marked the beginning of research into natural language question answering, and researchers began building systems… middle of paper… his. Lesk also pointed to some potential problems such as illegal copying, copyright law itself, difficulty for people to upload, legal liability and public policy debates that limit technological development and availability. These remain challenges for today's information systems and will likely take time to resolve. As a conclusion, the paper has made a good contribution to the field by describing the history of information retrieval systems from 1945 to 1996 with abundant information on the various technologies developed, information retrieval systems built and how they influenced research in information retrieval. I think artificial intelligence will begin to play a major role in information retrieval in the years to come, and one day we will have a true kind of information retrieval question answering at the fingertips of every Internet user..