Patent ID: 7415459

Claim:
A computer program product for use in a system including one or more data stores, a property store that contains items that identify various properties of the data objects, and a search engine that gathers and indexes data from the one or more data stores into a content index, the computer program product comprising one or more computer-readable storage media storing computer-executable instructions for implementing a method for focusing a search of the one or more data stores in order to identify and return a desired subset of objects contained in the one or more data stores, and doing so without accessing the property store to identify the location of the one or more data objects, wherein the search includes one or more terms, the method comprising: an act of including one or more scope restrictions in the content index that identify one or more folders where data objects are located that are indexed by a content index, whenever the content index is built and altered, wherein the one or more scope restrictions are non-text; an act of receiving a search request from a user for documents that include the one or more search terms; an act of implicitly adding at least one of the one or more scope restrictions to the search, such that the one or more scope restrictions are automatically included in a search of the data store; an act of identifying a first list of document identifiers from the content index by using the one or more search terms of the search; an act of identifying a second list of document identifiers from the content index by using the at least one scope restriction; a step for generating a subset list of document identifiers that are contained in both the first and second lists of document identifiers; and returning the subset list of document identifiers to a user without accessing the property store to identify the folder locations of the data objects that comprise the searched for documents.