Patent ID: 7328204

Claim:
A method to produce fast build and query times for document retrieval by querying a collection of documents for documents satisfying a pre-determined condition, wherein the collection of documents is represented by sparse vectors, said method comprising the steps: processing text of the collection of documents to produce a word vector, wherein words are keys, and values are chosen as desired, scanning word vectors and adding each value to a index matrix, receiving a query, and, for each word in the query, retrieving its document vector from the index matrix in constant time, if the words in the query are weighted, applying their weights with a linear time scale operation on each vector, combining the vectors into a single vector by means of a binary function and yielding total scores for each document, the single vector having document identifiers as keys and having merged data from each corresponding word vector as values, mapping a function across the values of the single vector to complete the scoring process, using the vector to display results to a user, which results identify the documents from the collection of documents satisfying the predetermined condition.