This article attempts to study both the graphic and the alphabetical (text) thesauri in SPINES and find out which is a better display format. An experimental design was conducted to compare the query formulation performance using a graphic and an alphabetical version of the same thesaurus. This study uses four measures to compare query formulation performance' QFER (Query Formulation Exhaustive Ratio), QFAR (Query Formulation Accuracy Ratio), QFC (Query Formulation Consistency), and QFT (Query Formulation Time). The assumptions of QFER and QFC were rejected at .05 level. For the other two measures, the alphabetical thesaurus is also superior to the graphic the。aurus. So the performande of an alphabetical the。aurus is better than a graphic thesaurus is proposed. In addition, the implications of those findings for thesaurus design were discussed.