Patent ID: 7240069

Claim:
A computer system for building large indexes comprising: an index engine operably configured for coupling with an indexer plug-in; an indexer plug-in having an index merger for concurrently indexing content in a plurality of sub-indexes and merging at least some of the sub-indexes created at a plurality of stages during indexing of the content, wherein the plurality of stages includes at least a first stage where a first set of sub-indexes are merged into new sub-indexes and at least a second stage where a plurality of new sub-indexes are merged into a master index; and one or more computer-executable instructions stored in a computer-readable storage medium, which when executed, cause the computer system to implement a method that includes: determining a number of stages for merging the sub-indexes by at least calculating a sum of half a number of sub-indexes at each stage and a product of the number of stages and the number of sub-indexes at each stage, wherein the stages are hierarchically arranged; determining the number of sub-indexes for each stage; building a sub-index in volatile memory; storing the sub-index in persistent storage as belonging to one of the stages; merging sub-indexes at a stage before a number of sub-indexes at said stage exceeds the number of sub-indexes determined for said stage; and storing the merged sub-indexes into the master index.