The profound implications of these Internet changes are so exciting that the classic information retrieval material seems dated and becomes some of the least interesting parts of the book. The authors distinguish their algorithmic approach from the user-centered perspective. In fact, human judgment is never far from the surface of the discussion. Relevance assessment is claimed to be central to information retrieval as early as page 2. Many of the traditional methods represent certain values and assumptions about the nature of text, as well as arbitrary threshold settings and so on.
Text processing itself stands on assumptions about how to tokenize and normalize text into words.
No matter how impressive the formulae, it appears that information retrieval is a very human process. So, in one spot we read that there are fundamental lexical problems in processing text , while in another spot the book presents a technique that assumes text processing is trivial. Apparently, information retrieval still awaits a single, evaluative exposition. To some degree this conceptual chopiness drives a wedge between the core text and the ancillary chapters. For example, the core text echoes the standard complaint that commercial vendors continue to rely on Boolean approaches while ignoring superior weighted term methods.