This article was written to get an initial understanding of Geographic Information Retrieval. Indexing and retrieving documents based on their georeferences in addition to other keywords seems to provide a powerful base for searching within given areas or locations and attempts to do this in a variety of ways have existed for about a decade. However, there seems to be some unresolved issues as well. In indexing place names has to be identified, but there is no one gazetteer service that provides all possible place names that may appear in a text and there is little support for content exchange or cross- server searching. Even if a place name can be identified, there are a lot of issues to consider when using place names like for instance non-uniqueness, spellings and representation form. Also, the identification of phrases that contains direct or indirect references to place names are problematic. The typology and structure of such phrases are different between different languages and a rule base or learning algorithm has to be constructed for each languge to capture the important phrases. How people reflect and reason about geographic space also have great impact on how they express geographical knowledge in texts and thereby what we can extract from them and use as the basis for georeferencing. Gazetteers have long stood their ground as lookup services for place names. But it seems that the relative simple structure of a Gazetteer is now being updated for a much more advanced usage. Geographic Thesauri and ontologies are terms that often is connected to this trend.