One observation I have to make: this community of information retrieval seems to be very thin-faced and cannot seem to accept outside contributions. I hope I am wrong.
This is not an isolated case. They rejected some industry changing contributions when they first came out.
For example, I remember that Google PageRank paper was outright rejected by SiGIR. Lucky for us, that paper was rejected, shattering the dream of an easy academia career for the two Google founders. Otherwise, we would probably still be searching with hotbots (remember that?).
The WAND paper was published in CIKM, a lowly conference in some people's eyes, I guess that's not the first venue they tried to publish that work in, because I worked at IBM Research before, I knew for a fact that CIKM was not in the first tier of the venues to publish, definitely not for the IR PIC.
Very interesting. I wonder what have caused this. My wild guess is that this may has something to do with early mistreatment the pioneering IR people received from the wider CS community, because their field was probably considered "soft" and not hard enough. For instance, even today, IR papers are not full of theorems and proofs, unlike some other CS fields, such as database. Their revengeful attitude got passed down to their students, as we can see here. And their reasons for dismissing other people's work are all the same: this is not new, we have done this before. But you have not, because the proof is in the systems you build and the papers you publish.
It does not have to be this way. HCI is even softer, but HCI is the most open field in CS, anyone can publish, you can prove theorems, or you can present user studies, anything goes. Funding? Not a problem. Because it is so open, HCI can work with anyone and on any projects. I remember that my advisor had so much funding, he basically paid me to whatever I wanted when I was in school. I am deeply in gratitude for that openness.