TREC: 1992-2025 and onwards
The 11 tracks of TREC2025 are underway, collectively constituting the 2025 edition of the "Text Retrieval Conference" organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. See the call for details and links, and this site for a few words about its history going back to 1992.
Wikipedia has more historical information, although the article's section on "Current tracks" is from 2018, which is not exactly "current".
And the Wikipedia article also doesn't give a clear picture of what TREC accomplished in its early years. Here's what it says about TREC-1:
In 1992 TREC-1 was held at NIST. The first conference attracted 28 groups of researchers from academia and industry. It demonstrated a wide range of different approaches to the retrieval of text from large document collections. Finally TREC1 revealed the facts that automatic construction of queries from natural language query statements seems to work. Techniques based on natural language processing were no better no worse than those based on vector or probabilistic approach.
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