: Although search engines are often used for information retrieval (IR) from the World Wide Web (WWW), current search engine technology seems obsolete. The quality of query results from today’s search engines is unacceptable, creating a demand for new information search and retrieval techniques. The conventional IR methods often lack the flexibility to adapt to changes in the content of the WWW. This paper presents an overview of new developments in evolutionary and adaptive IR and proposes a system (E.Coli search) where an adaptive population of intelligent agents forage the web in search of relevant documents.