The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between three query strategies with respect to retrieval effectiveness. The thesis aims at examining how two types of noun phrases containing a modifier to the head word, which is a noun affect the retrieval performance with regard to recall and precision. The noun phrases in the thesis are of two types: 1) noun phrases containing a modifier to the head word (which is a noun) and which are not dictionary phrases (NF) and 2) dictionary phrases. Both types of noun phrases in this thesis contain at least two words. The queries were executed in Query Performance Analyser, QPA, containing the InQuery system and a sub collection of TREC-Uta documents with its topics.