INVISIBLE THESAURI: THE YEAR 2000
Jessica L. Milstead · Online and CD-Rom Review · 1995
Reports of the death of controlled vocabularies and indexing in the age of full‐text retrieval have turned out to be somewhat exaggerated. We quickly found that the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’ rule applies, and that from the point of view of any one user at any one time, much of the text in a full‐text database is garbage. That is, it does not provide the required information, even if it happens to contain the words in the query. On the other hand, text that happens not to contain query words may still be very useful.