All the right words: Finding what you want as a function of richness of indexing vocabulary

The implications of index-word selection strategies for user success in interactive searching were investigated in two experiments. People were asked to find target information objects using a simple interactive keyword information retrieval system in which the number of referent terms assigned to each object was systematically varied. The results demonstrate that searcher success is markedly improved by greatly increasing the number of names per object. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.