Information sources are growing enormously and the biggest access point of information
today is the Internet. Search engines are the most popular information retrieval tools in
the web today. Bur they retrieve more junk than pinpointed information. Can thesaurus
be used in improving the quality of information retrieval, in this context ? Most of us are
familiar with the concept of traditional thesaurus or dictionary of synonyms. But online
thesaurus still remains a concept familiar to librarians, expert searchers and high-end
system developers only. This paper tries to discuss the role of thesaurus in improving the
quality of modern information retrieval.