BCS Search Industry Award: Nominations
We are delighted to announce this year's Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2025.
We are delighted to announce this year's Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2025. Presented by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS, these awards recognize people, projects, and organisations around the world that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of any people, projects, or products that deserve recognition, let us know by submitting a nomination. Alternatively, if you're involved with something special yourself, you can submit an application today.
More about nominating for the award
This year, we are offering four awards:
1. Best search project recognises the most impactful implementation of search technology or methodology in solving a specific problem or need.
Previous winners include:
- Datafari Enterprise Search, an open-source end-to-end solution covering the needs of enterprise search scenarios
- Wikiframe Visual Graph, a search capability for Special Collections data stored on Wikidata
- CiteSeerX, one of the largest open-source academic search engines with over 10 million documents
2. Search professional of the year is made to an individual who has made a significant contribution through their work and professionalism.
Previous winners include:
- Jayaprakash Sundararaj, Lead Engineer at Google
- Amey Porobo Dharwadker, Machine Learning Tech Lead Manager at Meta
- Adam Tocock, Library Assistant at NHS
3. Most promising start up (or new enterprise) recognises the innovative and disruptive potential of a business model, technology, or solution.
Previous winners include:
- deepset.ai, a leader in framework and platform technology that accelerates AI application development with large language models (LLMs); and the creator of the Haystack open-source framework
- batteryincluded.ai, First BI Product Discovery Framework incl. 3 pillars for highest relevance within global product listings
- Giotto AI, an all-in-one platform to automatize, digitalize, and standardize the data collection, analysis and writing of a Clinical Evaluation Report
4. Best paper/presentation (at Search Solutions).
Previous winners include:
- Taketomo Isazawa, Microsoft Research: “Beyond RAG: Integrating Knowledge with LLMs"
- Charlie Hull, OSC: “Pragmatic AI-powered Search – Keeping it Simple, not Stupid”.
- Filip Radlinski, Google: “Challenges with Really Understanding Natural Language in Conversational Recommendation”
The last award is open only to presenters at Search Solutions and will be judged on event day. For all others, apply today!
Winners will be selected by our panel of judges (details to be announced shortly).
The awards ceremony will take place during Search Solutions 2025.
We’ve designed the application process to be simple to complete:
If you are unsure which category to apply for, or have questions about the application process, contact us via the address below. For further details, see: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/bcs-search-industry-awards/
Nominations will remain open until 31st October 2025.
Contact
If you have any questions on the above, please contact the Awards Chair at udo.kruschwitz@ur.de with a copy to the IRSG Events Organiser at tgr2uk+irsg@gmail.com
About IRSG
The IRSG is a Specialist Group of BCS. Its mission is to provide a focus for the European IR community, facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners and promote the adoption of IR research within industry. We host a major European conference (ECIR) and provide an associated programme of workshops, seminars and events. The IRSG is free to join via the BCS website, which provides access to further IR articles, events and resources.
BCS is the industry body for IT professionals. With members in over 100 countries around the world, BCS is the leading professional and learned society in the field of computers and information systems.
