Abstract: In spite of the remarkable progress made in the past decades, multimedia information retrieval still suffers from the “intention gap” and “semantic gap”. To address this issue, researchers have proposed a wealth of query technologies to help user express search intent clearly as well as feedback technologies to help retrieval system understand user intent and multimedia data accurately, leading to significant improvements of retrieval performance. This paper presents a survey of the query and feedback technologies in multimedia information retrieval. We summarize the evolution of query styles and the development of feedback approaches. We elaborate the query approaches for retrieval on PC, mobile intelligent devices and touch-screen devices etc. We introduce the feedback approaches proposed in different periods and discuss the interaction issue in exploratory multimedia retrieval. Finally, we discuss future research directions in this field.