The primary purpose of this study was to investigate a robust search methodology that could be used in full-text information retrieval systems. A robust search methodology is one that can be easily used by a variety of users (particularly naive users) and it will give them comparable search performance regardless of their different expertise or interests In order to develop a possibly robust search methodology, a fully functional prototype of a fuzzy knowledge based information retrieval system was developed. Also, an experiment that used this prototype information retreival system was designed to investigate the performance of that search methodology over a small exploratory sample of user queries To probe the relatonships between the possibly robust search performance and the query organization using fuzzy inference logic, the search performance of a shallow query structure was analyzes. Consequently the following several noteworthy findings were obtained: 1) the hierachical(tree type) query structure might be a better query organization than the linear type query structure 2) comparing with the complex tree query structure, the simple tree query structure that has at most three levels of query might provide better search performance 3) the fuzzy search methodology that employs a proper levels of cut-off value might provide more efficient search performance than the boolean search methodology. Even though findings could not be statistically verified because the experiments were done using a single replication, it is worth noting however, that the research findings provided valuable information for developing a possibly robust search methodology in full-text information retrieval.