We have access to unprecedented amounts of information on the Web and in now digitized collections curated by museums, archives, libraries, publishers, or other institutions. The large-scale availability of information about our past and present offers unprecedented opportunities for researchers and other users, but also presents many complexities when combining information from different collections, from different institutions, and from different traditions of documentation. Big data collections bringing together many sources of information will be the driving force of research in the coming years. Modern search methods are needed to exploit the availability of massive data of relevance to almost any conceivable research question, hence new search methods become new research methods and search and research evolve in parallel.