Patent ID: 7620614
Filing Date: 2009-11-17
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method for retrieving documents, carried out by one or more computers, the method using a system retrieving documents, the system including a receive unit adapted to receive a query condition about retrieving documents specified by a user; a document retrieval computing-apparatus adapted to retrieve documents based on the received query condition; and an output unit adapted to output a result from retrieving the documents, with the document retrieval computing-apparatus having: a first storage unit; a second storage unit; and a processing unit; the second storage unit storing documents to be retrieved, and where data of the stored documents being readable by the processing unit faster from the first storage unit, than from the second storage unit, the method for retrieving documents comprising: in a loading operation on the first storage unit, acquiring a size of an available data storage capacity currently unused on the first storage unit, and a number of documents stored on the second storage unit, and calculating a size of a data storage portion of the available data storage capacity, to allocate to each document of the number of documents, extracting partial data for each document, with a size of the partial data being commensurate with a size of the data storage portion allocated to each document; and storing the extracted partial data as a partial document of each target document, onto the first storage unit, in a retrieval operation, performing a first retrieval of the partial documents stored on the first storage unit, thereby extracting documents that meet the query condition, for those documents that are determined not to meet the query condition based on a result from the first retrieval, performing a second retrieval of the documents to be retrieved stored on the second storage unit, thereby extracting documents that meets the query condition from the documents to be retrieved stored on the second storage unit, and outputting through the output unit, as results from the first and second retrievals, the documents to be retrieved that are determined to meet the query condition as hit documents, which are extracted through the first and second retrievals.