  In this paper, we present a new perspective of single server private
information retrieval (PIR) schemes by using the notion of linear
error-correcting codes. Many of the known single server schemes are based on
taking linear combinations between database elements and the query elements.
Using the theory of linear codes, we develop a generic framework that
formalizes all such PIR schemes. Further, we describe some known PIR schemes
with respect to this code-based framework, and present the weaknesses of the
broken PIR schemes in a generic point of view.
