Patent ID: 7814099

Claim:
A method comprising: running a query comprising at least two keywords in a documents database, producing a search result list of target documents satisfying the query, and providing said search result list to a computer program running in a computer, wherein as to each target document in the search results list said computer program performs the steps of: assigning a basic value of credit for each occurrence of a keyword that is found in the target document; identifying keyword groups in the target document by grouping keywords that are found in the target document without regard to keyword order according to a proximity relationship that groups each occurrence of a keyword with the next sequential occurrence of a keyword in the target document, an adjacency relationship in the target document applied to all keywords in the query, or both a said proximity relationship and a said adjacency relationship; assigning an extra value of credit to each occurrence of a keyword group identified in the target document; calculating a total value of credit of the target document, which total value of credit comprises summing each said basic value of credit assigned for an occurrence of a keyword in the target document and each said extra value of credit assigned for an occurrence of a keyword group in the target document; determining a maximum value of credit of the target document; and calculating a relevance rank according to a comparison function of the total value of credit and the maximum value of credit for the target document, and wherein the target document has a total number of words, said search query has a number of keywords, the step of assigning an extra value of credit to each occurrence of a keyword group comprises assigning an extra keyword value of credit for each keyword in each keyword group, and the step of determining a maximum value of credit of the target document comprises multiplying the total number of words in the target document by the sum of the basic value of credit of a keyword and the extra keyword value of credit assigned to a keyword in a keyword group with the same number of keywords as the search query.