Contributor to the Microsoft search engine Bing, Robertson is a British computer scientist well known for his work on information retrieval. After completing his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, he took an MS at City University, and then worked for ASLIB. He then studied for his PhD at University College London under the renowned statistician and scholar B. C. Brookes.
From 1978 to 1998 he worked at City University, and he held the post of part-time professor in the Department of Information Science. He has also been a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University.
In 1998 Robertson joined the Cambridge branch of Microsoft Research, where he led a group investigating core search processes such as term weighting, document scoring and ranking algorithms, combining evidence from different sources, and metrics and methods for the evaluation and optimisation of search. Much of his work contributed to the Microsoft search engine Bing. He participated a number of times in the TREC conference.
