A simple citation of Blair/Maron will show much of what is wrong, even though it is pre-WWW. Blair/Maron:1985 D. C Blair and M. E. Maron: "An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document retrieval system", Communications of the ACM, 28, pp. 280--299, 1985 I assume. -- http://pi0959.kub.nl/Paai/Onderw/V-I/Content/history.html is an interesting little overview (found with a Google search, of course :-)