Patent ID: 8843486

Claim:
A method for establishing a search scope for a query of documents, comprising: identifying properties related to the documents; generating scope-related index keys according to the identified properties; generating content-related index keys according to content of the documents, wherein the content-related index keys identify keywords in the documents; generating an index with a computing device, the index including: a first sub-index storing data associating the content-related index keys with subsets of the documents that contain the content identified by the respective content-related index keys; a second sub-index storing scope-related index keys, each scope-related index key being associated with a subset of the documents that have a property identified by the scope-related index key; and a third sub-index storing compound scope-related index keys, each compound scope-related index key being generated from two or more of the scope-related index keys in the second sub-index, each compound scope-related index key being associated with a subset of the documents that have two or more properties identified by the two or more scope-related index keys; and providing results to a search query containing a keyword and a scope limitation by: determining whether the scope limitation is a basic scope limitation or a compound scope limitation and using the respective second sub-index or the third sub-index to identify the subset of the documents that match the scope limitation; using the first sub-index to identify the documents within the subset of the documents that contain the keyword; and comparing the subset of the documents that contain the keyword with the subset of the documents that match the scope limitation to determine a common set of documents, and to identify the set of documents that satisfy the search query.