This is like cataloging only the titles of books without knowing their contents. Our belief is that the most accurate indexing of source materials occurs only when the full text of each document is examined. In the end, users will find search responses with the greatest relevance when this is the case. Several different technologies have been developed over the course of time to facilitate the search for information within a computer database. The following is a brief discussion of each of the major techniques, along with a summary of their relative strengths and weaknesses.
Boolean search is the earliest, most primitive technology.
It lets the user specify words or terms to be searched using logical operatives like 'and', 'or' and 'not'. While this is relatively straightforward, it does little to rank the matching entries. This results in high Recall, but rather low Precision. Fuzzy Boolean search lets you specify a series of words or terms, then ranks the matching documents in order of those containing all of the terms, then all but one, et cetera. This allows the user to add more terms to their search parameters, and maintain high Recall, but also increase Precision, at least at the top of the list.