Terrier is a highly flexible, efficient, effective, and robust search engine, readily deployable on large-scale collections of documents. Terrier implements state-of-the-art indexing and retrieval functionalities. Terrier provides an ideal platform for the rapid development of large-scale retrieval applications.

The open source version of Terrier provides a comprehensive, flexible, robust, and transparent platform for research and experimentation in text retrieval. The research put into Terrier constantly expands towards new branches of the wider information retrieval field, making Terrier an ideal, strong, modular, and state-of-the-art platform for developing, assessing, and evaluating new concepts and ideas.

Terrier is written in Java, and was used for Web and Enterprise search, Desktop, Intranet and Vertical search engines, as well as developing and evaluating novel large-scale text information retrieval techniques and applications.

Terrier is being developed in the Department of Computing Science, at the University of Glasgow.