ACM SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. SIGIR focuses on all aspects of information storage, retrieval and dissemination, including research strategies, output schemes and system evaluations.

Since the advent of the World Wide Web and the tremendous growth of the Web Search and Advertising industry, the SIGIR conference has become uniquely positioned as the pre-eminent forum for the dissemination and sharing of advances in the broad domain of Information Search and Retrieval. With a regular attendance of 600 to 700 delegates, SIGIR brings together leading international minds from science and engineering drawn from academic institutions and across the entire spectrum of web content and search companies to explore the frontiers of Information Retrieval theory and practice.

The annual SIGIR conference has a history that dates back to 1971. In that year, Jack Minker and Sam Rosenfeld organised the ACM SIGIR Information Storage and Retrieval Symposium. The first official SIGIR conference was held in 1978 in Rochester, New York chaired by James Iverson. The second conference, held in Dallas Texas, was chaired by Robert Korfhage. The third conference then moved across the Atlantic to Cambridge, UK, chaired by Keith van Rijsbergen in cooperation with the British Computer Society (BCS). The Cambridge conference started a tradition of alternating the conference between a North American and non-North American location. Today, SIGIR alternates in a three-year cycle between an American location, a European location, and another location. SIGIR was held in Portland Oregon in 2012 and the 36th edition will take place in Dublin Ireland in July 2013.