Boolean System Revisited: Its Performance and its Behavior

This experimental study attemps to provide a general conclusion to the Boolean information retrieval system regarding its performance on retrieval effectiveness and its behavior on retrieval of different relevant documents. Specifically a representative commercial Boolean system is compared to the best ranking systems reported in TREC4. The Boolean system delivered a comparable performance and retrieved a set of rather unique relevant documents. The study also justifies its methodology for comparing non-ranking and ranking systems