Patent ID: 8606789

Claim:
A method for querying a document collection, comprising: providing an index for a collection of documents in which content of document pages in the collection that has been decomposed into blocks is indexed according to representations of the blocks and geometric relations between the blocks, including indexing each of the document pages as a set of triples, each triple comprising a block representation for each of a pair of the blocks and a geometric relation between the blocks in the pair, each geometric relation expressing the distance between blocks, in two orthogonal dimensions; receiving a query document page into memory; providing for a query zone to be identified within the query document page which has an area smaller than that of the document page; generating a query based on representations of blocks determined to be within the query zone and geometric relations between them, including generating at least one triple, each triple comprising a block representation for each of a pair of the blocks in the query zone and a geometric relation between the blocks in the pair; and querying the index with the generated query to identify similar pages of documents in the collection.