Wire article

[robertson at tesla.njit.edu]

>"Organizing knowledge with a keyword index is less like a universal
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>library than like a giant, Burroughs-style cut-up poem.  Pages become
>organized together for no reason other than random confluence of words.
>While indexes solve the problems of subjectivity and scale that plague
>classification schemes, they don't impose enough order.  The more I tried
>to use Inktomi, the more I realized that operating just on words is too
>low-level.  There needs to be something in between."


     I have not read the article (so at the risk of flaming I'll
make a comment), but it sounds to me from reading the 
paragraph above that when the author wrote "keyword index," 
they really meant *Boolean* searching, which doesn't take into account
many of the far superior *non*-Boolean models of searching (e.g.,
relevance feedback, term frequency and context weighting, etc.)
(in addition to not taking into account precoordinate indexing
such as LCSH, Sears, etc.).

                 --Jim Robertson, Technical Reference Librarian
                   New Jersey Institute of Technology
                   robertson at tesla.njit.edu