This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2002, held in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2002. The 19 revised full papers and 6 short papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. the papers are organzied in topical sections on string matching, string processing, Web ranking and link analysis, pattern matching, digital libraries and applications, approximate searching and indexing techniques.